In a piece in The Atlantic last month, writer Mark Bowden recounts reading a book of military history filled with so many unusual words he was forced to consult a dictionary.
Here are some of the puzzlers in The Guns at Last Light [by Rick Atkinson], the trilogy’s final volume: bedizened, biffing, cozenage, bootless, jinking, maledictory, spavined, tintinnabulation, anabasis, flinders. Some in that list may be more familiar than others, but speaking as someone who has been reading and writing for four decades, if a word stops me, it’s going to stop most people.
Google Books’ Ngram Viewer, which charts how frequently a word or phrase appears in a sample of roughly 5.2 million books and 500 billion words, confirms the obscurity of these specimens. An Ngram score shows what percentage of the sample’s word count a particular word or phrase represents over a particular period of time. Take gutful, which makes up .0000005 percent of Ngram’s English-language sample from 2008 (when Last Light was published), as opposed to brave, its equivalent, which has a score of .001. Gutful is used three times in Last Light (pages 53, 167, and 346), which means that the author thrice chose a word 2,000 times less common than its perfectly suitable synonym.
Although Bowden ultimately enjoyed encountering new and unusual words as he read, the experience made him ponder the balance between prose that's clear and easy to understand, and the enjoyment of using and reading the occasional rare and therefore "spicy" word.
Atkinson is an old newspaperman, as I am. In newsrooms there is little patience for the use of a difficult word where a simpler one will do. “Good prose is like a windowpane,” wrote George Orwell in his famous essay “Why I Write,” a rule that would seem to counsel against ever stopping a reader with an unfamiliar word. It’s good advice for beginners, but serious readers are also lovers of language. I find that the occasional obscure word, used correctly, spices prose.
His piece inspired radio talk show host Larry Mantle of 89.3 KPCC Southern California Public Radio to invite Geoff Nunberg, a linguist and an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, and copy editor Stephen Dodson who runs the Language Hat blog to debate this issue on air. Is there ever a reason to use a word that most of your readers or listeners will not understand?
The radio segment also invited callers and commenters to the show's blog to contribute their favorite rare and unusual words. Check out this list of what they came up with. Or leave a comment with your favorite big word below!
