I was recently trolling through some language stuff (if you don't know, I'm something of a language and grammar aficionado) and I stumbled across this piece from Jeff Harrell, a writer in Washington D.C.
I hope it gives at least a few people out there as many giggles as it did myself. Enjoy
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Sunday, January 28, 2007, 8:43 am
Which is worse, a pompous ass or an illiterate jerk?
A reader pointed me this morning to the Pompous Ass Words Web page, a collection of “words that shouldn’t be used on the grounds that doing so makes you sound like a pompous ass.”
A few years ago — long enough that I can’t be bothered looking up the details right now — a member of a local governing body, like a school board or a city council, accused a fellow member of being niggardly. The fellow member, who happened to be black, flew into a rage, demanded the other guy be kicked out, threatened to file suit, and just generally went crazy over the repugnant racial slur.
Except “niggardly” doesn’t have anything to do with race. It means stingy or tight-fisted. Oh, and it dates back hundreds of years before that other word that sounds similar but means something entirely different.
In the wake of this public display of ignorance, a commentator for the local public radio station produced an on-air editorial in which she acknowledged that “niggardly” has absolutely no racist connotation or denotation, but upbraided the guy who said it for, in her words, “puttin’ on airs.”
All too often, accusations like these — that you’re being pompous, that you’re putting on airs — are used by uncomfortable people to defend the fact that they don’t know what you just said.
The English language is big. Nobody knows just how big; the exact size of our lexicon is a matter of some pretty heated debate among people who can’t be bothered to argue about football like normal folks. But everybody agrees that our language is big, with a variety of words and idioms unmatched by any other tongue.
The result is that our language can be beautifully concise if you apply just the right word at just the right time. It’s possible to convey a fairly complicated idea in such a way that your listener will understand perfectly, as long as both you and the other party know what all the words mean.
So when I use a word like “prelapsarian” or “rictus” or “risible” — all cherrypicked from the aforementioned list of pompous words — I do it because no other word fits quite so well, and in doing so I kind of assume that you either know the word too, or that you’ll get it from context, or that you’ll look it up.
It’s not pomposity. If it’s a sin at all, it’s the sin of over-estimating the reader’s intelligence. Or underestimating his laziness.
I mean, come on. What other word would you substitute for “prelapsarian,” a word used to refer to the time before the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden? It’s a metaphor, an invocation of a time of spiritual innocence without naivete. And it carries that delicious subtext of looming catastrophe. In one word, twelve letters, it sums up the whole archetype of the fall from grace, one of the essential aspects of the human condition, the idea that things were good but because of our innate failings those times ended and now we can only talk about them in the past tense.
What other word could possibly do all that? Hell, what other paragraph could possibly do all that? It would take a damn book to express all the connotation and context that’s crammed into that one little word.
Using an uncommon word doesn’t make you a pompous ass. Not if you use it well. The perfect word used perfectly needs no excuse.
Now, on the other hand, senseless jargon totally irritates me. White-collar pros love to use the word “learnings.” They organize a two-hour meeting then try to sum it up by talking about the “learnings.” To make matters worse, most of the time they talk about “key learnings,” as if there could be any other kind.
I guess the word “lesson” fell out of favor because it features in the phrase “teach you a lesson,” and could thus be construed as too overtly confrontational for the workplace. But seriously, that’s just as bad as eschewing the word “niggardly” because you’re afraid somebody might think you were flinging a racial slur. The idea you’re trying to express — of a thing that can be or has been learned — already has a perfectly good word: lesson. Use it, and don’t waste time trying to invent a new one.
Modern commercial English is riddled with such useless constructions. “Proactive” — meaning the opposite of “reactive,” but that’s just “active” which I guess didn’t sound cool enough or something so it had to be paired with an utterly redundant prefix. “Utilize” — a back-construction from the noun “utility,” which itself was derived from the same root that gave us “use,” which is exactly what “utilize” is supposed to mean; there is no context in which you can’t replace the word “utilize” with “use” and end up with a sentence that’s shorter, clearer, more euphonious and imbued with exactly the same meaning.
What’s really been irritating me lately is the unnecessary geometric metaphor, people who use a phrase incorporating an adjective and “sphere” or “space,” instead of using the noun they should use. I can’t think of an example right now that doesn’t get too specific into the kinds of things we talk about at work, but trust me, this one’s driving me bonkers. I’ve tried to buck the trend by using words like “polygon” or “pyramid” or “lopsided cone shape” in place of “space” or “sphere,” but nobody seems to have caught on yet.
There are probably greater sins out there than the willful obfuscation of natural language, but right now I can think of none that frustrate and depress me quite so much. Particularly when that obfuscation comes from people — writers — who are supposed to distinguish themselves through their ability to communicate clearly.
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