By the time I located the dictionary app on my computer, figured out how to use it, looked up “bildungsroman” and learned that it was a popular word in 19th-century Germany that meant “coming-of-age novel,” I was too tired to read the rest of the review.
I like to think of myself as a fairly literate person. Words, after all, are my business and I use dozens of them in every column. Lately, though, it seems I can’t read a newspaper, a magazine or the back of a cereal box without stumbling over words such as “schadenfreude” and “discrete.”
There are, to be sure, words a lot longer than those. There’s “antidisestablishmentarianism.” And “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Neither of which, by the way, is the longest word in the English language. The longest word has something to do with human protein and has 189,819 letters. If I tried to print it in this column it would run off the bottom of the page, continue on through the sports section, march past the classified ads and wind up in the comic section.
Not that there’s anything wrong with long words. William F. Buckley was famous for using them. Howard Cosell made a decent living and impressed Dandy Don Meredith by intoning words with lots of syllables.
But I can’t help but think that writers who use lots of long words when a few short words would serve the same purpose are trying just a little too hard to show off; sort of the literary equivalent of flashing a $12,000 Rolex when a $19.95 Timex would tell exactly the same time.
Mensa members and other really smart people have every right to gather and converse about their favorite “bildungsroman” while they sip their Gewurztraminer, of course, even though for most of us, “coming of age novel” would get the job done while we chug our Bud Lights.
And, for some writers there’s probably nothing wrong with using long words, either. Especially if their goal is to be published in The Journal of People Who Like to Impress Other People with Really Big Words.
For most writers, though, I’d pass along the advice I was given when I was starting out in this business:
“Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations possess intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously eschew all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, sebaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity and grandiloquent garrulity.”
In other words, keep it short.
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