GOOD REASON WHY SOME WRITERS USE UNFAMILIAR WORDS

It was just before Election Day, and a lady of my close acquaintance was
reading about the gubernatorial election in Florida.

"What," she inquired, "is a satrap?"

"Ah," said I, trying to be helpful, "a satrap is like a sachem, except for
the hairdo."

She rolled her eyes, and we looked things up. The first satrap was the
governor of a province in ancient Persia. The first sachem was the chief of
an Indian tribe in colonial New England. Manifestly, these days Gov. Jeb
Bush is a reelected satrap, and Sen. Edward Kennedy is a family sachem, and
the question for today is, Why do writers toss us such out-of-town words?

The answer, of course, is that writers throw us sachems and satraps for the
sheer hell of it. In the same fashion, chickens lay double-yolk eggs and
the guy on the trumpet goes up an extra octave in the coda. There is great
satisfaction to be had from getting familiar with an unfamiliar word.

William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative columnist-novelist-polymath, is
the leading apostle of the unfamiliar. He wrote a column in September
defending the legalization of marijuana. "Experience," said my good friend,
"is teaching that however ill-advised it may be to take the drug, it is
less well-advised to continue to arrest 10,000 people every week for a
practice or indulgence of such exiguous social consequence."

Exiguous? It means "small, minor, inadequate, excessively scanty." Why did
not my brother speak simply of "little social consequence"? He cannot help
himself. as comfortable with "exiguous" as Tiger Woods with an old putter.
When he is charged with using unfamiliar words, he pleads not guilty:
"They're not unfamiliar to me."

There is much to be said for the Buckley approach. If a writer discards the
exact but unfamiliar word in favor of the almost exact but generally
familiar word, he gives his readers less than his best effort. He
deliberately dumbs down. At the same time, there is even more to be said in
favor of writing in a vocabulary that one's readers will understand.

Another of my brothers in the pundit racket, George F. Will, has a great
affection for the four-dollar word. In the presidential campaign of 2000,
Al Gore repeatedly said of the Democrats that "we can do better, we can do
better." Said Will: "Gore, a passionate recycler, got that trope by
reaching back to John Kennedy's 1960 campaign."

Gore got a what? He got a trope. That is, he used a familiar figure of speech.

The New York Times last year carried an item on daylight-saving time as it
is observed in rural Indiana. It appears that many farmers have refused for
decades to go through the ritual of "spring forward, fall back." Said the
Times correspondent: "Now that may be changing, with farmers and other
traditional daylight-saving opponents losing ground to the avatars of the
high-tech economy."

Losing ground to what? Several centuries ago an avatar was "an incarnation
of a is Hindu god." By extension, an avatar has become "an embodiment or
personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life." Those of
us in the writing business seem to be losing ground all the time, but those
Indiana farmers are in worse shape than we are. They are losing ground to
avatars, for Pete's sake.

Jonathan Nicholas, a columnist for the Portland Oregonian, tried his hand
as a part﷓time teacher at Beaumont Middle School. The experience led
him to a great idea: Teachers should have a right to pick their own
students. Given this authority, a teacher could get rid of the
troublemakers, banish the chronic whiners, and expel any kid who wouldn't
work. "Farewell," cried this former teacher, "Farewell, faineants!"
Irresponsible idlers! That's what MerriamWebster calls faineants. My mother
would have called them loafers.

Don't get me wrong about hard words. I love them. They leave me
ensorcelled. And if a word or phrase is overly recondite or esoteric, so
much the better. You, too, may be at least a satrap, a sachem, a pandit or
a pundit. And if critics call you a gascon or a fanfaron, you will know
that rodomontade is not their bag. All clear?