What’s in a Word? 

In Elements of Style, authors Strunk and White define the standard for modern English prose. One of their many rules: Avoid fancy words. “Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute,” they say. “Do not be tempted by a 20-dollar word when there is a 10-center handy, ready and able.”

It’s true. In most cases, it’s better to:

* Use lucky instead of fortuitous.

* Use lie instead of prevarication.

* Use ideal instead of optimal.

* Use possible instead of feasible.

* Use read instead of peruse.

* Use question instead of interrogate.

* Use argument instead of altercation.

* Use substitute instead of surrogate.

As James Michener said in his autobiography, The World Is My Home, “the challenge is not to use big words, but to accomplish extraordinary things through ordinary words.” And he added that he, himself, always tried to follow “the pattern of Ernest Hemingway, who achieved a striking style with short, familiar words.”

I like Hemingway too. He may be the most influential prose stylist of the second half of the 20th century. But there are others that I like as well. Like Faulkner, Joyce, Nabokov, and Isak Dinesen (whose prose style, by the way, Hemingway greatly admired).

As for nonfiction… I’ve been editing and coaching professional writers for nearly 40 years. And along the way, I’ve done a lot of thinking about how to explain what good, nonfiction writing is. This is what I tell writers now:

Good nonfiction writing is good thinking, cleanly expressed.

I will save an explanation for what I mean by “good thinking” for another time. The second part of the definition – “cleanly expressed” – bears on the issue at hand. By cleanly expressed, I mean succinctly and without ornamentation.

You take a good thought and you present it to the reader laid bare of verbal makeup or clothing. If the idea is truly good, it is also beautiful. And if it is beautiful, it should be shown naked.

And that is why, when writing or speaking to educate or persuade, we should make our syntax and diction simple. We should prefer simple sentences over compound and complex sentences, and monosyllabic words over synonyms of three or four syllables.

But that does not mean that there are not times and cases where fancier words should be preferred.

There is an expression in French: le mot juste. It means the correct word, the precise word. It means that sometimes good writing (and speaking) requires us to stretch a little to fetch the less common, more colorful, multisyllabic word to convey exactly what we mean.

When you want to describe that very human (but shameful) experience of feeling good about another’s bad fortune, for example, there is no better or even other word for it than schadenfreude. Or when you want to describe how the conversation felt after someone left the room, halfhearted or lukewarm may not be exactly right. But desultory might.

There are also times when you might want to use an uncommon word precisely because it is uncommon. When, for example, it would be stronger to say “gobsmacked” rather than the more tepid “amazed.”

Good writers and public speakers understand the primacy of thought and the importance of simplicity of expression. But they also understand the occasional need for le mot juste.

Here are some thoughts from seriously good writers (and thinkers) on the subject of words and how we should use them:

* “I like good, strong words that mean something.” – Louisa May Alcott

* “I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.” – Tom Stoppard

* “Language. I loved it. And for a long time, I would think of myself, of my whole body, as an ear.” – Maya Angelou

* “Our choice of words often reveals the depth of our knowledge… or ignorance… or that of our desire to be deemed knowledgeable.” – Mokokoma Mokhonoana

* “Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all.” – Winston Churchill

* “A writer need not be bound by flat statements like ‘It was a rough sea,’ when verbs like tumble and roil and seethe wait to spill from her pen.” – Rebecca McClanahan