In Defence Of Obscure Words
Writing guides tell you to dumb it down. Isn’t it time we smartened up instead?
If you’ve made it past the headline on this article then chances are you are the loquacious type, a word-nerd, a grammar nazi, or some combination thereof. (Go ahead and debate amongst yourselves my use of the Oxford comma in that last sentence — I’ll wait). Voracious readers, fellow writers, editors, I see you over there. Welcome, all of you — you are among friends. Now that we’ve got the room to ourselves, let’s settle in and have a wee chat about verbiage, shall we?
The other day I was drafting an article on Medium and found myself wrestling with whether I could use the word “ubiquitous” in the sub-headline. It was the classic art vs. commerce debate: following your muse versus selling out.
On the one hand, “ubiquitous” is a delicious, juicy morsel of a word, it was ideal in context, and I really wanted to use (deploy?) it. On the other hand, my inner-editor voice was shouting at me that ubiquitous is a grown-up word that too many readers wouldn’t grasp. Using it would immediately shoo away boatloads of potential readers before they ever got started. I pause here to confess that as a relative newbie to Medium I am a tad overly obsessive about obtaining exposure for my articles and trying to crack the code of…
