THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT



We commonly say that a long word should not be used where a short one's available. There's undoubtedly some truth in this: we feel glazed, brow-beaten by a Samuel Johnson feast of Latinisms, words that break over our heads like Atlantic rollers; we cry out for something grittier, more earthy.

But there's much more than that to the words we use or to those we're prepared to endure without rebelling. First, if we don't know a word, our reactions may be quite complex. The question that comes most readily to mind is whether the person using it is showing off; but hidden in subconscious depths lurks another one: are we just plain ignorant? And does this repressed thought set off a whole process of resentment and hostility? Of course length is not the only stumbling-block. If a monosyllabic word is unknown to us - like yod, jun or parge -, it's still unacceptable simply because we don't know it, though it does remain a fact that most unloved terms are polysyllabic.

While preference for short words is widely expressed, this is largely a matter of 'social correctness', more honoured in the saying than in the writing. In Operation Shylock Philip Roth says on page 107: 'Avoid fancy words. Sounding like a highbrow. Drop negativism, intensive, immunity. Anything bookish bad for your purpose,' and on page 273: 'There was a commanding incongruousness about this Teutonically handsome Tel Aviv Jew who'd taught himself to speak English in the impeccable accent of the English upper class, and something also touchingly absurd about the bookish erudition of his hotel-lobby lecture and the pedantic donnish air with which it was so beautifully documented.' I should add that, while there's undoubted irony here, it's a fair example of Roth's style. In other words he is seduced by the perceived superiority of the colloquial over what he calls the bookish - but merely as a rhetorical statement to clear himself with the thought police; and then he gets down to the business of using the whole battery of words.

Society acts in general like this American novelist. One day a word is anathema (pardon me: 'denounced as something accursed'), and the next, by the magic of media acclimatisation (phew! that's another knockout!), it becomes acceptable. Listen as down-to-earth Jon Snow, no namby-pamby academic, uses a big word on the seven o'clock news without batting an eyelid; rather, it has rolled off his tongue with the casual ease of familiarity. Thus criterion was only a restaurant in London for most of us till it achieved acceptance - in the plural -, almost replacing good old standard. The fact that criteria is now on everyone's lips puts the whole question of a bookish vocabulary into perspective. Like candelabra, criteria is beginning to lose its singular form but also its formal classiness or pretentiousness. We can use it without showing off or appearing to do so - a most serious consideration in our social interactions.

And yes, verbal exhibitionism is unfortunately a part of life: just as some men are content to expose themselves in urinals or bedrooms while others must do so before the female public, certain speakers get the hots by flashing favourite words, specially to virgin ears. Such a person speaks of parameters as if he were knitting matrices in his spare time and only dropping the occasional n-dimensional vector. Why not factors or elements? Because there are overtones of higher mathematics and arbitrary constants in the word? Because it's the latest fashion, the last word in words?

Such ostentation, though, no more reflects on the word as such than the pathetic soul opening his mack to girls reflects on the usefulness of his penis. You see, words are like countries. Until the 90's most people didn't know Bosnians from bosquets or Burundians from blunders: the decade put their countries respectively on the map. (Burkina Faso still awaits its own spectacular tragedy.) Likewise, criteria, escalate, phenomena have taken Alice's shrinking medicine and are now as unthreatening as cod or piece.

However, while such words have gained almost universal approval, we all have our own individual choices of expressions which, for personal reasons exclusively, we patronise. If when reading Virginia Woolf we come across 'Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England' and don't know a euphemism when we see one, it strikes us as a display of verbal athletics. On the other hand, if we know the word, our response is simply to translate its sound waves into meaning, not to indulge in emotion.

One reason for the great variety of synonyms is that they help us avoid repetition; a more practical one, though, is that most have particular applications and flavours; at the very least their dissimilar sounds make them singular. If I look up impure in my thesaurus I find it has sixty-five synonyms, only ten of which are monosyllabic.

Let's take three of them and see whether they're interchangeable: 1) prurient: marked by unwholesome desire, with the accent on a mental, voyeuristic enjoyment; 2) lubricious: marked by wantonness, with a connotation of secretions and slipperiness; 3) erotic: arousing sexual desire.

I'll make three quotations, misplacing these words: 1)[It] titillated erotic people by its frank discussion of sexual experience. 2)[. . .] eluding the prurient embraces of her wealthy employer 3) The lubricious power of perfume.

As you see, the words, though synonyms, are out of place here. Some of the sixty-five synonyms can, on the other hand, be used in practice as substitutes for virtually the same idea - for example, bawdy, Rabelaisian and ribald. But I say in practice. At least theoretically but often practically as well they are all three of them capable of somewhat different meanings: the first, 'boisterously or humorously indecent', the second, 'grossly, robustly humorous' and the third, 'coarsely and indecently humorous'.

I'm now looking at a random page of my dictionary: out of the fifty-six entries I only know forty-three. Put the other way, I don't know 23% of these words. I'd hazard a guess then - and its accuracy is not important here - that I'm familiar with some 75 to 80% of the words in my language (and this is to ignore the more narrowly specialist terms). Should this tell me that the remaining ones are so much trash? That would be to use my ignorance as a criterion for the limits of other people's vocabulary.

In the case of more specialised words, they do have an almost barbaric sound to ears unaccustomed to them. Take ithyphallic (four syllables), one of our sixty-five synonyms for impure; the definition is 'trochaic dimeter brachycatalectic' (twelve syllables); a more down-to-earth interpretation would be 'verse of two feet, of which the first is a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable, the second consisting of a stressed, an unstressed and two stressed ones (thirty-three). Thus the more we reduce the length of certain words, the further we increase the overall length of the substitute phrase. It's clear that, forbidding though it may be, ithyphallic can have a use for prosodists ('analysts of verse' to us).

It seems to me that there is room in the world of discourse for words from every quarter - scholarly ones, everyday ones, even slang. Each of us will find a balance, but it's in the nature of literary variety that no one balance can impose itself on everyone. Gertrude Stein has her champions, but so does William Faulkner. The former's childlike simplicity conceals a rapier understanding:

The former's childlike simplicity conceals a rapier understanding:  

He said French boys who went to the lycées which are controlled by the government did believe in what the teachers believed, and therefore they never did revolt, but boys who went to what in France they call a boîte, a box, that is to the religious schools, the Catholic  schools, they did not have to believe what the teachers believe, they could and did believe in Catholicism but they did not have to believe what the teacher believed and so they did have some intellectual freedom.

At the farther end of the scale Faulkner conceals a touching simplicity beneath sonorous diction:  

[He was] walking the last silent and empty block, ringing his footfalls deliberate and unsecret into the hollow silence, unhurried and solitary but nothing at all of forlorn, instead with a sense of feeling not possessive but proprietary, viceregal, with humility still, himself not potent but at least the vessel of a potency [. . .]    

It may be unwise to take sides. What is reasonably certain is that adopting an ideological stance on one extreme or the other - or even on what we take to be the centre ground - is to erect our own personal limitations into an absolute standard - criterion if you prefer. Both the literary Luddites and word-burners who wish to impoverish language within the limits of their own knowledge on the one hand and the self-consciously educated on the other - only a syllable or two up on their peers -, who flatter themselves on this meagre addition, show the same intolerance.