ENGLISH | LANGUAGE
Is Language an Economy or a Tapestry?
The tight rope walk between brevity and beauty
To read this piece for free, click here.
For much of my time as a writer, I’ve been torn between two camps. Since middle school, my father instilled in me an appreciation for words and each of their distinct meanings. For any given idea, there are a million ways to express it. To include every possible permutation of polysyllabic phrases, proverbs and platitudes, we begin to enter into delightful verbal infinities.
Yet another piece of advice I’ve found almost as guiding is George Orwell’s wisdom that “if I can eliminate a word, then I must eliminate it” and that I should “never use a complicated word where a simple one will do.” Though it’s not as Orwellian as so many of his other ideas, it reeks of rigidity without fully verging on the dystopian.
Sure, there’s not much sense in using the word “peradventure” outside of Renaissance Faires when “perhaps” will always suffice. Nor will you be winning any readers over by correctly using the word “verisimilitudinous” in a sentence. Sometimes, we cloud our ideas by using words that remove readers from the immediacy of the moment or image.
