• The Power of Really Big Words
    And related query I had as a child


    tab Growing up, words were something that was often encouraged to explore. Explore their meanings, their uses, and how to correctly use them for day-to-day use. The size of them hadn’t really held much meaning to me until the discovery of Scrabble. Then, it made sense that big words beat out little words; it was a game designed to reward the player for using more letters rather than less letters; whether you knew what your word meant was entirely optional. However, as I grew older, I began to find that this philosophy expanded much farther than a Scrabble board.
    tab As I began to write essays for school, I came upon an unusual phenomenon: the more big words I had in my paper, the more points I seemed to get. Granted, these were only the early essays that involved a minimal amount of thought to complete, but still it bothered me. On the playground, if someone was trying to bully me, I found that the bigger words I used, the more confused they became, and eventually left. It was a rare and unusual thing, and as I got older, I began to abuse it more and more.
    tab At first, I felt invincible. Like Mary Poppins armed with her supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, I used bigger and bigger words, often swimming in dictionaries for a new arsenal of words to have at my disposal. Instead of saying my hat was ‘red’ I’d remark that my hat ‘was the shade of rubicund’, or ‘just off scarlet’. Granted, the more and more big words I used, the less people wanted to be near me. I was powerful, but I was alone.
    tab As high school rolled around, I found that I wasn’t the only troublesome teenager splattering essays with ridiculous verbiage. While I might have been one of few to actually bother looking up the meaning in the dictionary, a round of freshman year peer editing revealed that tons of students had been riddling their papers with ‘aforementioned’, ‘prepossessing’, and ‘enthralling’. Sometimes I’d run into a truly unfortunate misuse of the word ‘explicate’, or ‘elucidate’. While my continued use of big words continued to aid my essays, I began to notice more and more students around me struggling to find some magic formula that would allow them to mash a bunch of big words into their papers…instead of just using terms that made sense in context. In most cases ‘explain’ would have worked more than sufficiently; in others, there was no need for the word ‘corollary’, which given the context it had been used, crippled the paper.
    tab Now as a college student, I am forced to wonder why do we give so much value to ‘big words’ that we feel the need to use them to a fault? Politicians use them in a similar way that I did as a child; to say what you mean in a way that is intentionally confusing to the ‘common ear’, but not to other trained political ears. Teachers use specific big words that are designed to narrow the meaning of a smaller word to better elaborate on what they are trying to teach. But for the more part, big words are more or less just fancy decoration for a dull sentence.
    tab After a bit of clicking around, I spotted various other mentions of ‘big fancy words’, and decided to see what more important people than my modest 21-year-old self had to say about it. Zachary M. Seward of the Nieman Journalism Lab2 addresses the use of big fancy words in newspapers in his article, ‘N.Y, Times mines its data to identify words that reader find abstruse’, and writes that “The Times has great data on the words that send readers in search of a dictionary”. While normally one would expect a paper meant for ‘the everyday reader’ to be user-friendly for those of us who did not choose to beef-up our vocabulary for sport, such was not the case for The Times. Seward remarks that the fact this data is documented could aid The Times to reconsider such large words, and “improve their journalism by studying user behavior.” The three words that left readers scratching their heads the most were sui generis, solipsistic, and louche. Interesting synonyms for these words were the commonly used words unique, egocentric, and shady. While these were only used in 27 articles or less, the longest of the words in the list would have left a Scrabble table in awe: epistemological. What does it actually mean? Even in its most concise definition, the word’s meaning is best described as “requiring an account of how knowledge of the given subject could be obtained” by Merriam-Webster.
    tab Incidentally, The New York Times contributor Philip B. Corbett addresses the same topic in his article ‘Big, Fancy Words’1 . Says Corbett in his article, “I’m not trying to ban these or any challenging words. Some uses may be perfectly justified. But we should keep in mind why we’re writing and who’s reading, and under what circumstances. And we should avoid the temptation to display our erudition at the reader’s expense.” Followed by the same list that was used in the article by Seward, it would at first glance appear that he has a point about the use of big words; these words do not intentionally to demean a reader.
    tab Upon further reflection, I looked for some words of wisdom from some of ‘the greats’ of our time. C.S. Lewis tells us, “Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.” Unsuprisingly, William Butler Yeats remarks that it is better to “Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.” Although perhaps the truest of them all, the remark of Mark Twain that “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” And Robert Southey’s maintained belief that, “It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.”

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    works cited
    1. Corbett, Philip B. "Big, Fancy Words - Times Topics Blog - NYTimes.com." Topics - Times Topics Blog - NYTimes.com. Web. 28 May 2010. <http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/big-fancy-words/>.
    2. "N.Y. Times Mines Its Data to Identify Words That Readers Find Abstruse » Nieman Journalism Lab." Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University » Aiming for the Future of Journalism. Web. 28 May 2010. <http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/ny-times-mines-its-data-to-identify-words-that-readers-find-abstruse/>.