The trouble with using a four-foot-long word is you risk sounding ostentatious. (See what I mean?) I’ve tried to argue that we should learn more and bigger words, but I’ve been trounced by smarter people and I surrender. But I must make one final jab at the editors and readers who have not humored me.
A quick glance through the writing guides will get you variants of George Orwell’s idea that “good prose is as clear as a windowpane.” To be absorbed in a story, a reader must have enough mastery over the language so the imaginative work of piecing together the story or idea remains subconscious. Encountering an unfamiliar word obscures the idea—a bug smear on Orwell’s windowpane—jars you out of that flow state of reading, and fragments the narrative. It’s like not being able to see the road for the dirty windshield. If you are not the type to delight over an unfamiliar word, this is frustrating.
If. Open your mouth and say the word widdershins for me, please. Feel how it rolls of the tongue? Some editors would say, “Why would you say widdershins when you can say counterclockwise? Nobody will know what you mean.”
The rejoinder is obvious. Why would you say counterclockwise when you can say widdershins? Besides, widdershins means “wrong or contrary direction,” which is something like a contrarian at a cake walk. That’s a big difference from a bewitched clock. And what if the reader would know what you mean? Wouldn’t they feel like they got the joke?
There are many things in the world I will never understand. Why women wear high heels, or men start wars, or people take selfies. But I’ve reconciled to the fact I’ll never understand it and that’s okay. Are you going to make me explain why I like words like weltschmerz and schadenfreude and widdershins or can you just accept it?
Ok, fine.
A syllogism:
- Knowledge is power
- Knowledge is packaged in words
- It follows that words are power.
In pre-white times, the Koyukan Indians of Alaska would gather for elaborate feasts called potlatches. This gathering might include up to three or four hundred people, each contributing a little food. With mounds of food sitting around, but before they began to eat, two Koyukon elders would walk into the center of the group, sit on their feet, and have a debate using “high words,” which were complicated Athapaskan words known only to the elders or better educated in the village. They would try to outdo each other with their ability to remember and use these “high words.” Remember, this is a primitive culture signaling status and power via vocabulary, not hunting or fighting prowess.
For another example, take a secret code, and see what kind of power that gets you. Immediately, it draws a line: some people are in, some are out. There’s power in it. You can make plans for a make a surprise attack, or gather your forces while the enemy is still in the dark.
Still another example. Learn the jargon of a sport, profession, or religion, and you’re an insider, the entrance into it being the language. Name this occupation: elbow, snake, rough-in, PEX, SharkBite, ABS, PVC. Get it? You’re a plumber. If you’re a sobo or nobo, you’re hiking the Appalachian trail and your southbound (sobo) or northbound (nobo). Learn the language, and you’re an insider. Football, baseball, hockey, soccer, mathematics, crocheting, skiing, fly-fishing; all of them have specialized vocabularies, and it raises the chicken-and-egg question: which comes first, the understanding of the sport or the language that allows us to understand the sport? Which brings us to the next point.
My brother and I have a running argument: He says we think in a language, I say language is a medium to express thought, with thought and language being distinctly different products of our minds. I base my argument on the idea that we cannot always express what we think, or that some words are more perfect than others, and that we need to invent words at times for certain situations. I must ask him how a deaf person, who has never understood any language, can think?
But I do concede that thinking and vocabulary are closely related, in ways too intricate for me to understand. Whenever someone discovers a new idea, they immediately name it. This idea is given shape by the structure of language. With apologies to Jordan Petersen, it’s our way of making order out of chaos, like magic. Naming something allows it to occupy space, we can write it on a piece of paper and there it is, a signpost that represents a segment of the phantasmal world of ideas.
Take all the –isms out there for an example, all of the ideologies, movements, and beliefs categorized and represented in a single word. Postmodernism. Modernism. Industrialism. Scientism. Antidisestablishmentarianism. (Take that!) All of these words represent a complicated set of beliefs about the world or the people who study them. But these words gather all the details into a package, simplifying communication without rendering the idea simplistic. When we use a word, it calls up all the details associated with it like a spirit from the dead, but we go on, sharing assumptions, and do not need to clutter our brains with all the subpoints of a particular idea. We can grab it by the handle and go on. Imagine trying to explain industrialism without being allowed to use the label for it.
Thus, if you accept my reasoning, it is only a small step from that premise to my conclusion: the more words we know, the more nuanced knowledge we can have, the cleaner thought processes, the better the conversations, the more vivid the stories. Take a look at the following diagram.
Life does not come to us in packages, chunks, or squares. It comes to us in waves, continuums, and endless figure eights. Whenever we assign a word to a concept, we are assigning an idea, a fluid thing, to a place, a fixed thing. The only time we hit the line of what we mean to say is when we cross it.
Like the childhood connect-the-dot pictures, we can only draw straight lines from fixed point to fixed point and get a herky-jerky drawing to approximate human experience. This, of course, has always been the problem with language, but it is much better than nothing. The rest must be filled in by imagination (therefore good communicators need imagination). However, if we know more words, we can get closer to expressing what we mean. Like this:
While still not perfect, it’s closer. Across the continuum from obsequious to submissive, we have all these words that almost get it right for different points of experience. According to the thesaurus, all these words are synonyms but we do know that submissive is something completely different than obsequious. To write or communicate precisely, we can use the rich language to be more precise.
Communication is agreeing on a set of assumptions about a language, and only when we understand the terms for a particular word do we communicate. Listen to philosophers debating, and they spend most of their time defining terms. They might agree on a word but disagree on its meaning, and this takes them far apart. We might agree to eat lunch at McDonald’s, say, but forget to define which McDonald’s. A Democrat and Republican might agree to fight racism, but forget to define what they mean by “fight” or “racism.” Any politician worth his cornbread knows how to be a philosopher in reverse by exploiting the shadowy words. An honest and truthful person is using exact language, getting as close to the truth as possible to avoid miscommunication, and doing it with as few words as possible. Which means we will load each word to its carrying capacity for meaning, but mostly we will know when to stop talking.
I’m still not done. Perhaps we will never be able to use a sesquipedalian word in speech or writing and get away with it. But they are still not useless. Each word occupies a unique spot in the language, and, if your audience does not understand the word, or if it would be pretentious use it, you can use the definition of that word to explain your thought. Instead of using the word sesquipedalian, you might just use its latin definition, “a word a foot and a half long.” Building vocabulary will simplify speech and thought process by adding, because we have ever more unique compartments to categorize situations.
I know I’m still a long ways from justifying the use of unfamiliar words in prose. Even with 250,000 entries in the Merriam Webster’s, we do most of our communicating with a set of about 500. And it’s not about how many big ones you know or use, it’s about how you wave the little ones.
As I said, I have lost this argument from all practical standpoints. But that doesn’t stop me from wishing it were different. I mean, who doesn’t like a word like gobsmacked, kerfuffle, or mollycoddle?
Apparently many people. But not you and me. Right?
Right?