Sesquipedalian loquaciousness

An acquaintance asked a rhetorical question, "At the risk of sounding like a pretentious sesquipedalian, if you have $5 words, why not use them? You ought to be getting your money's worth."

This inspired some thoughts about big words--words that are 1.5 feet in length or longer. (Sesqui = 1.5. Pedalian = relating to feet.)

I think that it depends upon what you got for your $5. The first consideration when contemplating long word use should be introspection: Don't be a Dogberry. In Much Ado, Shakespeare's Dogberry is an ass, because he uses words whose meanings he does not understand.

So, you've heard the word "loquaciousness" and you think it's a good fit for your writing. But are you really sure you know what it means? If you have to run to the dictionary, stop. You don't know it well enough to use it.

Some times much speaking is not loquaciousness and do you know when that is? The word must fit better than a square peg in a square hole. It must be right.

If you've read the word in only one place, don't use it. If you've never encountered it in conversation, don't use it. Sesquipedalian loquaciousness must be reserved to that subset of your vernacular on which you stand most firmly.

I regard words as semantic legos that one strings together to express thoughts in sentences and paragraphs. Most times the simple retangular bricks do the trick. This argues for the predominance of homely words. You can get the most semantic bang for the vernacular buck with homely words.

Yet some ideas, like "holomorphic vector bundles on stein manifolds" require the jargon of the specialist. Other words my lawyer friends tell me are "terms of art" wherein specialists say things that seem on their face to mean one thing, but in the peculiar context they were used they shall mean another. If you don't know this, don't use this.

Finally, let's turn our attention from the writer and what s/he knows to the reader and what s/he knows. If your reader is online and only a few clicks away from a google search, that's an entirely different thing than if your reader is OFFline and at least a few klicks (as in kilometers) from the nearest dictionary.

The writer may tease the reader, but should not annoy the reader. Or make the reader feel stupid.

Really, really smart and important people have no idea what sesquipedalian means. And only people with some kind of weird word fetish can get as far as "something about 1.5 foot." (This is why you want your kids to study Latin in school.) If you seriously expect your reader to know a long word, it had better be with the awareness that you--the writer--are crazy, and they--your readers--are normal.

I am a hopeless pedant and I thank you all for tolerating me.

The writer should build the majority of his prose around homely words that everyone understands. And when s/he puts in a less-common word, context should provide effective clues as to its meaning.

Take vernacular, a word that drove me to the dictionary when I was younger. The phrase "that subset of your vernacular" can clue the careful reader that something with a subset is also a set. We're talking about words, so it's a set of words. And I said, "your vernacular" which means it's something you possess. So, vernacular is the set of words you use.

After peppering this note with all these foot-and-a-half-long words, I hope I haven't made a Dogberry of myself.

Stupid Villainy

Unhappy events in my life have reminded me that criminality if far more plausible when it is stupid than when it is genius. We like our detective fictions to be chess matches between masters. We want to see Holmes contending against Moriarty, Spiderman against Green Goblin, James Bond against Ernst Blofeld--the list goes on. But villainy in real life is far more often perpetrated by idiots.

I tend to forget this. I've complained about the villain who feeds minions to his sharks when they displease him. Why would I go to work for the guy in the monocle who kills off his minions? That's moronic.

Consider the movie Fargo. This movie is hilarious. William Macy plays a feckless loser who hires two criminals to kidnap his wife. The criminals are hilariously stupid as you can see in their various interactions. Their madcap antics turn this comedy into darkest black when they start murdering innocents.

This illustrates something significant. You may need to be smart and/or good to make it through life, but you can be both stupid and evil to create a great deal of mayhem. The best crime writers know this and they can make the reader laugh at the stupidity of enterprising criminals who end up re-enacting Wile E. Coyote pratfalls and Darwin Awards. This can add some comic relief to some rather heavy reading. And then you can make your readers feel guilty for laughing.

Unthinking villainy can affect well-educated folk, too. Let's suppose I were a High School Chemistry teacher with cancer and neither money nor insurance for chemotherapy treatment. Sure, I could start cooking meth, but that would entail scary work with scary colleagues. OR I could saw off the end of a shotgun, walk into a bank wearing a Barak Obama mask, and demand the contents of all the registers. The feebs would pick me up before dinner time, and after my conviction on bank-robbing & weapons charges, they'd ship me off to the Mayo Clinic to get my cancer cured at public expense. That's a lot smarter than what Vince Gilligan's villain came up with in Breaking Bad.

Let's face it, you don't have to be Darth Vader to choke the life out of your girlfriend. And you don't need to be Gabbar Singh to toy with the victims of your cruelty.



I think stupid villainy is something like Mr. McGregor's veggie garden. You've got a nice, tidy little garden going on. Then some pestilent little bunnies come along and take what they want and cause damage much greater than whatever value they could derive.

These criminals may aspire for the "big score," but they are seldom capable of more than venal enterprises. Their misdemeanors reflect the lack of trust they inspire. Smart people do not leave high-value items unprotected. They do not entrust high-value items to lame brains. The protection afforded high-value items is seldom penetrated by numb-skulls. The criminal who is a dunce must settle the scrap-metal value of a cast-iron antique he steals because he lacks the sense to take it to somewhere besides a junk-yard. They feel they've put something over on you when they lie about matters inconsequential.

This mindset is what I think lies at the heart of Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. He has the role of constable, he's not very bright, and he tells himself he's not a criminal by affecting the intelligence he does not possess.

Of course, the cretinous villain does not realize his disability. He thinks he's the smartest guy in the room. This makes him ripe for manipulation. Which I suppose is something the super-villain with a monocle knows. S/he can promise the dimwit shiny things. "After we hold the moon for ransom, you'll be right there at my side."

More likely, the smart villain can set up the blockhead villain with a "big score" to the end of getting him caught, whereupon the smart villain can steal the lolly from the evidence room. (This scenario does not even require a super-genius villain.)

So, next time you're up for some crime writing, or want to put together a mystery, consider putting some addle-brained imbeciles on the chessboard.

More Stolen Commandments

A while back I wrote about Robert Heinlein's 5 Commandments for writing.  Those are good commandments and you should do your best to incorporate them into your writing.

Besides writing commandments I don't think C. S. Lewis and Robert Heinlein had much in common.

Ferinstance, I don't see Lewis ever really grokking Stranger In A Strange Land. Nor do I think Heinlein would get much out of Perelandra. Yet in these differences, we see commonalities: both fellows wrote well and knew how good writing works.

And here are C. S. Lewis' 5 Commandments for writing for the reader's edification.

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.
2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don’t implement promises, but keep them.
3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”
5. Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Lewis' commandments are not as concise as Heinlein's. They reflect the fact that Lewis was an academic and like all academics that write, prone to say too much.

When Shakespeare wanted to show someone to be an ass he never did so as effectively as with his character Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. This character was prone to malapropisms. Don't be this guy. You want to be the anti-Dogberry.


I write poorly when I don't have a clear idea in my head of what I want to convey. This clear idea needs to get out of my noggin and into yours. Since you're not telepathic, I have to use words to express my ideas in a way that your thinking matches my clear idea.

1. Words can be slippy things. It's easy to write something that can be construed differently from what you intend. You can't just get each word's denotation correct, but you must string all the words together in a manner that straightforwardly conveys your intent. You can't just shrug when a sentence is unclear. Dammit. Rewrite it until it is clear. Or yank it out until you have not only clarity of thought and intent, but clarity of expression.

One pill makes you larger

One pill makes you small

But the pills that mother gives you

Don't do anything at all

Go ask Alice when she's ten foot tall

2. Words are pills. Dogberry is the ass because he doesn't know one pill from another. Shakespeare's genius is that he is able to give the theater-goer contextual clues to discern what Dogberry intended to say so that when he actually says something wildly inappropriate you get the joke. You discern from context that Dogberry wants to take the larger-pill, but instead he takes the small-pill and incongruity results in a hearty laugh at Dogberry's expense.

A plain, direct word as Lewis recommends in this case is a pill with minimal side-effects. It makes you big or small without making hair grow out of your ears. The long, vague words that Lewis warns us about invariably have side effects built into them. Sometimes you do need to grow ten foot tall with hair growing out of your ears, but those times are not as common as you might think. And instead of seeming smart and stylish, the unintended consequences of the long, vague word end up making you look foolish.

I don't think Lewis is saying never use the long, vague word. Just know all the baggage and side-effects it carries with it and gauge that against your intent. And prefer the simpler generic when it works as well.

3. Lewis advises that when choosing between two nouns, prefer the concrete to the abstract. This is a bigger problem for the academic who writes than for the rest of us. Experts tend to work in the abstract because they can bounce ideas around, manipulate them, and then apply the abstract to a broad spectrum of circumstances. Working in the abstract can be like swimming to the fish. Or it can be like being tossed into the deep end of the pool when you can't swim.

Writing and reading is communication. Whereas some can't work in the abstract, many more folks (if not everyone) can work in the concrete. People tend to remember concrete details better. In urban legend the details provide the touch points that lend internal consistency and believability. These are critical success criteria in writing.

4. Encompasses the old writer's proverb: Show, but don't tell. When I say that the girl is beautiful an event terrible or a song delightful it's a summary. There's nothing for the reader to interpret. The writer has to leave something for the reader to interpret. Otherwise, the prose is as appealing as pre-chewed food.

The writer has to think deeper about concept of beauty when writing about the girl who's as cute as a basket of kittens. OK, what made her so cute? What was the exact shade of hair? Orange highlights you say? How was it cut? Neat or messy? How about the shape of her face? Cheekbones? Large brown eyes? Anything distinctive about her breasts? Dancer's legs? Shy or aggressive?

The writer has to figure out what exactly the POV character will experience that creates in him the impression of beauty. Then select the best details to convey. Then string together the best words the reader will interpret as a depiction of beauty.

This is why Lewis characterizes this cheat as, "Please do my job for me."

5. When Lewis says, "Don’t use words too big for the subject," I hope he had in mind something like, "Superlatives are for children." When I was younger, I read Perry Rhodan novels. They were ripping yarns, but over time I noticed some inflation going on. Instead of two spaceships fighting a battle, there were two hundred ships engaging the enemy. The numbers got bigger and bigger. And if the numbers of dreadnaughts remained fixed, the size of the super-dreadnaughts they were going against were bigger and bigger. This cycle would go on for a few novels, and then they'd have to do something else.


I think Lewis' commandments are harder to keep than Heinlein's commandments. I understand them, but I find that I don't remember them. They're more tactical and mechanical, so it's harder for me to dredge up concrete examples in my own writing. They're safer because you won't get an argument like you might about Heinlein's 3rd commandment. Nevertheless, this writing process isn't something that's ever finished. We take whatever we can to improve from wherever we can.