Let us begin with a very simple and obvious rule. When you are writing or speaking, always use words that you know how to use.Knowing what a word means is not necessarily the same as being able to use that word confidently and correctly in a real-life sentence. As was mentioned in "Beyond Correctness," everybody has what is known as an active vocabulary and a passive vocabulary. Your active vocabulary consists of the words that you use in everyday speech and writing. They come to your mind without great effort; you know how to pronounce them, how to spell them and how to make sentences with them. Your passive vocabulary consists of words that you recognize and understand when you hear them or read them, but that do not normally spring to your lips. You may, for instance, have no difficulty in understanding a word such as reaffirmation. Even if you have never encountered it before but know the verb affirm, you can, in any case, easily work out what it means from the way that it is constructed. You might not, however, feel at all confident about where and when to use reaffirmation effectively. The occasions on which anyone needs to use it are relatively rare, and the contexts into which it naturally fits are relatively formal and intellectual, so you may never have had occasion to say it or write it down. If this is the case, reaffirmation belongs to your passive vocabulary.Your active vocabulary is much larger than your passive one, and the former is what you should rely on. Do not be tempted to use words that you know only passively in order to spice up your writing, in case you misuse them in some way. It is better to use words you know than to spoil the impression you are trying to make by an error of grammar, spelling, or usage. For example, an article on reconstruction work in run-down areas of large cities in a recent issue of a scholarly magazine contained the phrase well-healed gentrifiers. The writer had no problem with the rare word gentrifiers—people who renovate old buildings or run-down districts in order to provide accommodations for new, more affluent residents—but had obviously never seen the much more common word well-heeled in written form or had no sense of how it came to have its current meaning. He or she no doubt thought that well-heeled was part of his or her active vocabulary but was mistaken, having no notion of how the word evolved and consequently how it was spelled.It is no disgrace not to know any particular word, especially a hard, long, or technical one. It is, however, a disgrace to misuse a word, especially when recasting what you want to say and using more familiar vocabulary would avoid the mistake. It is good to try to enlarge your vocabulary: the more words you know, the more precisely and subtly you will be able to express yourself. It is bad, however, to overreach yourself in your choice of words. It is almost always better to keep things simple. There will be times when you want to try out new words. Choose appropriate times and contexts, that is, occasions, when your credibility as a writer is not at stake.With this basic principle established, let us now return to our discussion of the nature of English vocabulary and the considerations that should guide our search for the best word to fit the circumstances.PairingsA particular feature of the English language is that it frequently offers a choice between a simple word and a longer and more complex word that mean virtually, and in some cases exactly, the same thing. One such pair of synonymous terms is the ordinary word sneeze and the very learned word sternutation, which means both "a sneeze" and "sneezing." The French word for a "sneeze" is éternuement and the Spanish word is estornudo. The French and Spanish terms look rather similar and are, in fact, linguistically related to each other: They both derive from the Latin word sternutatio. At some time in the 16th century, the scholarly or more pretentious classes in England decided that they needed a grander word for the humble sneeze. They turned, as they usually did in such cases, to Latin, to the same Latin word, in fact, that had evolved into the ordinary words for a sneeze in French and Spanish. The word sternutation was adopted into the English vocabulary, and it remains there to this day.Similarly, the French word for a "storm" is tempête and the Spanish word is tempestad. English has precisely the same word: tempest. All three go back to the Latin word tempesta. Neither French nor Spanish, however, has a word for a period of violent weather that is linguistically akin to the basic English word storm. Similarly, neither of these languages has a word that looks or sounds like sneeze.A full list of pairings in English would be very long indeed. Here are but a few examples. All the words in the right-hand column come either directly from Latin or, more usually, from Latin via Old French. They also tend to be longer and more formal than the words in the left-hand column, which have Germanic roots.| from German | from Latin/Old French |
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| ask | request | | brotherly | fraternal | | buy | purchase | | cat | feline | | dry | arid | | earthly | terrestrial | | fight | battle | | give | donate | | hard | difficult | | icy | glacial | | king | sovereign | | light | illumination | | motherly | maternal | | name | nominate | | odd | strange | | prick | pierce | | quick | rapid | | reach | attain | | sad | miserable | | top | summit | | udder | teat | | weak | feeble | | yield | produce |
This does not mean that English is full of words that are superfluous because they have the same meanings as other, generally older and simpler, words. Where a new word was introduced alongside an existing one, it usually developed a slightly different meaning or other differing senses over time. We now, for example, speak of "a miserable hovel," but not "a sad hovel," and "a feeble joke," but not "a weak joke." The scope we have for differentiation in the way we describe things is much greater because English contains words of both types.The fact that English can offer us these options is a direct result of its history. Although modern speakers and writers of English are unlikely to be often in a dilemma over whether to choose tempest in preference to storm, let alone whether to describe a sneeze as a sternutation, many of the everyday decisions that confront them when they sift through English's vast vocabulary for the right word to suit the occasion are bound up with that history. A very brief account of it is, therefore, in order here.
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