Intelligent people often like to use intelligent sounding words. Words like “nonplused”, “loquacious” and “limerance” spice up writing and conversation, add beauty to language, and can seem to give the speaker an aura of sophistication. Even those who don’t consciously cultivate having a large vocabulary may start to use such words automatically, having read them sufficiently many times in books or articles. Unfortunately, obscure words have a tendency to interfere with communication.
Sometimes it is argued that using obscure words is good because they allow us to more concisely express precise connotations than we otherwise could. Instead of saying “There were many hats in the barn” we can say “There was a plethora of hats in the barn.” The latter phrase means more than that there were just a lot of hats.
The issue though, is that most people don’t know the precise connotations of obscure words, and the word “plethora” serves as a good example. It is often defined to mean not just “a lot”, but an excess or overabundance. However, when you see the word used in context, while the implication of “many” is often clear, the specific connotations can be much less so. If you’ve never looked it up, but have just tried to understand the word from seeing its usage, it can be quite hard to pickup on this nuance. And if you do take the time to look it up, it can be easier to retain the gist than its subtleties, so one may forget the part about “excess” and remember only “a lot”. Since, by definition, obscure words don’t occur very often, we likely have not seen them used a great many times. That means that compared to common words, we don’t have many data points from which to infer precise meanings. Even if according to the dictionary “plethora” carries just the message you hope to express, that matters little if the people you are communicating with don’t understand your precise meaning.
Even those who know that the word “plethora” often has a connotation of excess may be doing little more than translating “plethora” to “excess” in their minds. That is, they might not have seen the word used enough times for “a plethora of pineapples” to mean something beyond “an excess of pineapples”. When this is true, little is gained by using “plethora” instead of just “excess.” The former is certainly less likely to be understood than the latter. And though it is true that the former sounds more sophisticated to some people and can act as a signal of education level, this can backfire at times. Some audiences will view the use of this word as pretentious, and according to one study at least, “Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity”, writing using complex vocabulary may even cause you to be viewed as less intelligent in certain contexts.
If you are writing poetry or fiction, where the beauty of the language can be as important as the content, a varied vocabulary is probably quite useful. But if your overriding goal in speech or writing is to communicate information, avoiding obscure words is usually a good idea. Of course, what counts as obscure will vary depending on the audience (if you’re speaking to mathematicians, words that are common in math papers but are obscure in typical english will, of course, be fine). But, generally speaking, words that are uncommonly used are less likely to be understand than common words, and even in cases when they have precise connotations that it would be useful to convey, those connotations may not be fully understood by your audience.
These considerations can lead us to an odd conclusion. If your goals prioritize communicating information over expressing yourself elegantly, you may actually be better off knowing fewer words. The trouble is that if you know obscure words well, you will be less likely to realize how obscure they are, and may use them automatically without even considering that others may misunderstand them. Having a large vocabulary is viewed, nearly universally, as a good thing, but in fact there can be negative consequences to making your vocabulary too large.
Before using an obscure word, ask yourself, “Is this really the clearest way to communicate what I’m trying to say?”
I enjoyed your post; it reminded me of a similar passage I read a long time ago (and sadly I don’t recall its source). Paraphrased: “words don’t convey meanings, they call them forth; I speak from the pool of my experience and you listen from yours”. Using language outside the realm of typical experiences of your audience may have unintended consequeces and may actually obscure the meaning your aiming at getting across. The point is that sharing common experience is really the only way to be “on the same page” with those we’re speaking with.
It feels different to read plethora than to read excess. There’s a poetic angle to language.
Taken as a general strategy, it increases the erosion of the language. More words become obscure, which are then avoided, then lost, and then more words become obscure. ‘Velleity’ is an excellently useful word and it is a shame almost nobody knows what it means.
Google knows, though, which means near everyone with internet can easily find out.
Excess is clearly latin and plethora sounds greek. I wonder what the english word is.
I regard this heuristic as obstinately and inexorably pragmatic and instrumental in the magisterium of communicated articulation.
I’m not sure if the title of this blog post was meant as a sort of self referential joke, but if not, then it should follow it’s own advice. According to my own intuition, and also according to the really fine text editor at https://splasho.com/upgoer6/ , plethora is actually a MORE common word than eschew. In fact, eschew is not even in that site’s word list, even though it’s so common that I mostly knew what it means. (Plethora is still pretty rare though: according to that site, there are supposedly over 32000 words that are more frequent than it.) Even “obscure” is a bit obscure: around 14000 words are more common.
So, an alternative suggested title that follows its own advice might be:
Avoid Rare Words
Now every word has a rank below 3000 🙂
We can do a tiny bit better by rephrasing the title in terms of what to do, instead of what not to do:
Prefer Common Words
“Prefer” is ranked at around 2000 and “common” at around 1500. “Words” is frequent (around 700), but the singular “word” is a bit better (in the low 400s). Thus, if we want to go “all the way” I propose:
Try to use the word that everyone knows
(It turns out that “everyone” is almost perfectly tied with “word” and all the other words are slightly more common than either of those two.)
Of course, frequency is not perfectly correlated with how well known about word is. For instance, most kids learn the month names at a pretty young age but month names just don’t come up all that often. So we can’t assume a word is obscure merely because it’s rare. But inference in the other direction should be very safe: if a word is common enough, then basically everyone knows it.
With that in mind, let’s find some other rare words in this post:
nonplused, loquacious, limerance: these were used as examples, so free pass
Concisely: I was surprised that this word was so rare as to not be in the word list; I’m starting to think something is off about this list. The root “concise” is more common but still has a rank of over 29000. Not quite as bad as plethora, but not ideal.
Connotations: even the singular “connotation” is not in the word list; not was the verb “connote”. Can we avoid this word? Do we need the exact connotations conveyed by the word “connotations”? Is “meaning” not close enough? How about “shades of meaning”?
Overabundance: this word is rare, but we may be tempted to give it a free pass because the etymology is obvious at a glance, so even someone who’s never seen it before can hopefully break it down into “over-abundance” and then intuit the approximate meaning from there. However, abundance is itself not a very common word: it’s rank is roughly 23000. Luckily, in context we also have “excess” (rank is reasonable: in the mid 11000s) which we’re told is a synonym, so I guess it’s fine.
“erudite vernacular utilized irrespective”: this was a quote, and the word choice was clearly to make a point, so it’s okay
Contexts: the singular is common enough, so whatever. I’m going to stop mentioning rare words that have a frequent riot or stem. (Okay, just briefly: elegantly, clearest, overriding, mathematicians, uncommonly)
Of course, I absentmindedly used some rare words in this very long comment. (E.g., self referential.) The upgoer text editor has an annoying length limitation and I’m tired of trying to work around while typing on my phone, so I’ll not be analyzing my whole comment for rare words 🙂
Hi Mark, yes, the title is a joke 🙂
I also think it makes writing worse to try to only use the most common words (note that this is different than trying to avoid obscure words).
Sorry, the formatting of my comment got messed up.
I think most of my line breaks got lost.
Is this fixable?