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).

I think most of my line breaks got lost.

Is this fixable?

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 🙂

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.