[j. d. worthington]

Bravo, Teresa! Thank you for this!

Yes, I've always found it very irksome when people complain about even obscure words when they are exactly the word necessary to not only convey the general impression, but the precise nuances of the object, the time, and the overall milieu. This isn't being obscurantist or "high-falutin'"... this is called genuine communication, as what you're trying to get across simply could not be said in other words. A shadow of it perhaps, yes; but that is not communication. That is the road to miscommunication.

And a good deal of it has to do with the fact that we have become "lazy readers": we complain when a writer takes time to say something; to, in the words of William Godwin, "develop events, to discover their capabilities, to ascertain the different passions and sentiments with which they are fraught, and to diversify them with incidents; that give reality to the picture". We don't want to think about what we're reading; we want entertainment. But all too often it is entertainment of a very shallow sort; not something that truly engages the intellect or the deeper emotions, but very much surface, with a tendency to follow shopworn "time-honored traditions" of melodrama: titillation rather than having our genuine emotions stirred. This is like a child who must always have something to catch their attention or they become bored and destructive.

It isn't all this way (thank goodness), and there even seems to be something of a trend away from this and into a deeper sort of reading by a small but growing percentage of younger readers. But it is still the predominant trend of thought, and it impoverishes both the language and the reader; for to rob oneself of something which has deeper emotional resonance because it also requires a little more effort on the part of the reader, is to rob oneself of the life-enriching experience that truly good literature can be. And truly good literature, written by writers who are careful to pay attention to such delicate shadings, nuances, and elusive impressions (which necessarily requires a more extensive vocabulary -- the analogy of the palette is a very apt one), does demand that the reader not just sit back and have it all handed to them, but that reading itself becomes a creative collaborative act... but the rewards are correspondingly so very much greater.....

There is also the problem of inevitably finding oneself repeating words, which in itself makes the language of the writing dull and lacklustre as well....