Black Hippie Chick Day: Using Words that Work

I own a book called, “The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate.” Here are some of the words it contains:

Epistolary
Sangfroid
Malefic
Detumescence.

Here are some of the words it does not contain:

Red
Moist
Bloom
Creak.

Did you get as much of a sense of “sangfroid” as you did “red”? Well, no.
Did you feel moist as well as you did malefic? No.
Did you hear “creak”? Probably.
Did you hear “malefic”? Probably not.

Unless you're an academic writer, The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate is a curiosity and little more.

Here’s a paragraph of meaningless prose:

If one examines neocapitalist libertarianism, one is faced with a choice: either accept neosemiotic nationalism or conclude that the goal of the participant is significant form. The premise of neocapitalist libertarianism implies that society, perhaps ironically, has intrinsic meaning.

Ironically, that text has no intrinsic meaning. It was generated by a machine as nonsense built from big words. It was created as a mockery of academic bullshit, and it's very successful at that.

Here’s a simple poem:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

That’s Ted Hughes—one of the most sophisticated writers of his era, and he used words like “wet” and “black.” You will probably not find the words “sangfroid” or “malefic” in his work because they evoke nothing. They just sit around looking important. They aren’t particularly good at doing their job: connecting and evoking.

The meaningless text I cited earlier is literally nonsense, but if you pass it through a pseudointellectual, they will likely pretend they know what it means. Ask me. I've tried it. For such people, dictionaries for the extraordinarily literate are useful for finding a new level of one-upmanship. There are times when we need complicated words because simple ones don’t exist to fit a precise definition. I’m not suggesting all writers resist precision. I’m only suggesting you use words that work.

We are not extraordinarily literate. We are writers. We’re not doing this for one-upmanship. We’re doing it to make people feel, so what good is a word like cynosure?

Here’s a poem for you:

If dogs did bark and birds did fly
If blue the hue of cloudless sky
If bells did ring and starlings sing
The world would be a perfect thing.

• Gus Ferguson