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A hundred-dollar word isn't worth a nickel. And a ten-dollar word is worth a million bucks.
Hundred-dollar words are fancy words that will make you wonder if the writer's just showing off. Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s famed columnist and grammarian James J. Kilpatrick: “Use familiar words-words that your readers will understand, and not words they will have to look up. No advice is more elementary, and no advice is more difficult to accept. When we feel an impulse to use a marvelously exotic word, let us lie down until the impulse goes away.”
One big-city newspaper assembled its own list of the words its readers most often had to look up. Is that something about which you'd be proud? If you're a reader of this blog, we're going to give you credit for having more than a third-grade education. If you don't understand some of these words, we'll argue they have no business in a daily paper. Here are the top ten. We saved you time and looked them up for you (see links.)
1. Inchoate
2 Profligacy
3. sui generis
4. Austerity
5. Profligate
6. Baldenfreude
7. Opprobrium
8. Apostates
9. Solipsistic
10. Obduracy
Now look at the opening to Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451. It, well, blazes with ten-dollar words. Somehow, you don’t need to look them up.
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“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.”
A lot of words are somewhere in between the hundred-dollar and the ten-dollar. Our best advice: Find your voice.
Watch this on video: https://youtu.be/OIbEVkRo0qQ
Next time: In praise of editors.
Readers: "Something Went Horribly Wrong," features samples of bad writing we see nearly every day. You can participate! Be our duly deputized “grammar police:” Your motto: “To protect and correct.” Send in your photos of store signs, street signs, newspaper headlines, tweets, and so on. It doesn’t have to be a grammatical error. It can be just what we call “cowardly writing.” Include your name and home town so we properly can credit you. You're free to add a comment, although we reserve the right to edit or omit. Now get out there! Send to Eliot@eliotkleinberg.com
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NOTE: Eliot and Lou Ann are available for speaking engagements, and can travel. Reach us through the comments section. Just think of all of your employees getting back to work on a Monday, their heads filled with all the ways we’ve shown them to be better communicators!