Lexiphane

Welcome back, reading and writing audience. 

When I took my daughter Chilko on a road trip of New England, we stayed with our cousin Ann and played Balderdash, which is a word game where people make up definitions of real words and vote on the right answers. Ann, an artist, wiped us off the map winning almost every round by making up the best definitions and voting more consistently on the right ones. When I sent her the link to this article*, Ann replied: "I enjoyed reading that and having my suspicions confirmed about the oneupsmanship (that should be one word!) of using long words where shorter ones would give more clarity."

*Here's an article from Harvard about using big words:

http://harvardmagazine.com/2014/05/the-undergraduate-word-upmanship

Short, Hemingway style sentences are good for telling stories of what a man did or said.

Big words can give more clarity in technical situations or fields. For instance, a geological word like "diktytaxitic" is actually the shorter way of saying, "that texture in volcanic rocks in which the minerals angle against each other with tiny angular holes that are not round vesicles but interstitial spaces between the grains bounded by actual crystal faces". The geological dictionary usually adds that the word pertains especially to olivine basaltic rocks in the northwestern US, namely, the Columbia River Basalt. For more igneous rock terms:http://www.people.carleton.edu/~bhaileab/petrology/BH250Slides/CommonIgenousTexturalTermsandPhotomcirgraphys2.html

The joy of small words is that many of them are multifaceted and can mean different things depending on the context, and so the inherent ambiguity embedded in the English language comes into play. A word like "diktytaxitic" prevents most ambiguous interpretations, which is what a scientist wants, specificity. On the other hand, words like "set" or "so" or "sorry" can mean a lot of things simultaneously. [For instance, the Canadian sorry:http://cutlerish.tumblr.com/post/3573065230/canadians-say-sorry-an-awful-lot-but-they-rarely].

Chilko quoted Shakespeare the other day, "I saw the treasons planted" (Cleopatra speaking, Antony and Cleopatra, Act I, Scene 3). Only in English would that spark double meaning in a person's brain, enriching the interpretation to include a mental picture of the growth of a forest of duplicities.

Thus, Shakespearean ambiguity might be good for what women have to say.

Note also the sexist biases implicit in the choice of a simple word like man or woman instead of person or people.

More word play to come.
Have a productive summer, even if your goal is 13 barbecues and a visible tan line.

Rock on,
Jennifer Getsinger
July 21, 2014