It sometimes seems as if the writers of books on style are by nature hostile to long, uncommon, or abstract words. If they truly were, then it would probably set them apart from most of the word-loving population. A survey was held in the United Kingdom in the year 2000 to find the nation's favorite word. The winner was serendipity. It won thanks as much to its musicality and quaintness as to its cheerful meaning. It is not a particularly short or common word, but then the words that people are especially attached to are not necessarily those that they use every day.In Shakespeare's play Henry IV, Part 1, Hotspur tells his wife to "Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art, / A good mouth-filling oath" (3.1.249–250). People like good mouth-filling words: prestidigitation, deliquescence, fructification, vulturous, discombobulate, infeasibility. There is pleasure in saying them. There is satisfaction in knowing what they mean. There is even greater satisfaction in being able to use them correctly. Some long words have the romance of exotic place-names; some have the horrible fascination of great carnivorous dinosaurs. They enrich the language and are often a great source of humor—characters in literature are seldom made fun of for habitually speaking in short, simple words. They can sometimes be used to great effect. Turning to Shakespeare again, this time in his play Macbeth, "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / clean from my hand?" asks Macbeth after Duncan's murder. He answers his own question: "No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red" (2.2.58–61). Those two tremendous polysyllabic words evoke the vast restless ocean, the enormity of the crime, and the troubled state of Macbeth's conscience in a way that the simpler phrase that follows them and ends the speech on its own could not. But few if any of us have Shakespeare's skill in using language.Long words are usually considered, and treasured, in isolation. Prestidigitation is a wonderful word, but when are you likely to use it? Outside the technical contexts to which so many of them rightfully belong, long words exist almost in limbo. It is not easy, for example, to construct a realistic sentence containing the word serendipity, or indeed any of the words listed in the preceding paragraph. Technical terms, many of which are very long and very complex—gyrostabilizer, laparoscopist, metamathematical, ultracentrifuge—are in some ways easier to put into sentences, perhaps because there are often no simpler one-word alternatives for them. But the nonspecialist is seldom called upon to use such words at all.Long words, then, have their uses, but their uses are limited. They are not needed, for instance, to produce a grand effect:[A]sk not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. [T]hat this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Great statesmen know rhetoric and are expert users of it, but they do not use long words. They achieve grandeur through the way they arrange simple words and the rhythm they give to their utterances.Great writers in previous centuries did not use more long words than their modern counterparts do. The standard writing style in earlier times was usually more formal than it is nowadays, but formality is as much a matter of tone as it is of word choice. The famous 18th-century lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson is reported by his biographer, James Boswell, to have occasionally expressed an idea in relatively simple language, then decided that a straightforward statement was unworthy of him, and set about reexpressing the same thought more magniloquently. But Johnson was a phenomenon even in his own time, and, in this respect at least, is not a suitable model for a modern stylist.The disadvantages of longer words have been referred to more than once. They may confuse the reader; they may confuse you; they may make your writing unnecessarily abstract or inflated. Always use long words with care.
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