Is Language an Economy or a Tapestry?

For much of my time as a writer, I’ve been torn between two camps. Since middle school, my father instilled in me an appreciation for words and each of their distinct meanings. For any given idea, there are a million ways to express it. To include every possible permutation of polysyllabic phrases, proverbs and platitudes, we begin to enter into delightful verbal infinities.

Yet another piece of advice I’ve found almost as guiding is George Orwell’s wisdom that “if I can eliminate a word, then I must eliminate it” and that I should “never use a complicated word where a simple one will do.” Though it’s not as Orwellian as so many of his other ideas, it reeks of rigidity without fully verging on the dystopian.

Sure, there’s not much sense in using the word “peradventure” outside of Renaissance Faires when “perhaps” will always suffice. Nor will you be winning any readers over by correctly using the word “verisimilitudinous” in a sentence. Sometimes, we cloud our ideas by using words that remove readers from the immediacy of the moment or image.

On the other side of that coin, though, is the fact that each word carries a distinct flavor and phonetic intrigue. I can think of at least twenty five words that mean to “insult or speak negatively about,” and each has its special time and place. One can defame, decry, denounce, disparage, denigrate, deride, derogate, deprecate, abase, asperse, traduce, vilify, ridicule, revile, belittle, condemn, calumniate, castigate, excoriate, slander, smear, scorn, besmirch, malign, impugn, insult, libel, or lambast. And one must use each in its proper place!

In language, some of these places may be vague and abstract or pinpoint-specific. But these nooks and crannies of expression exist and there are words that fit neatly into them. In little corners of life linguistic opportunities lie in wait. And if the human condition wasn’t riddled with such strange crevasses of experience, there wouldn’t be words for them.

There’s a colossal palette we have to choose from in each word that queues itself on the page. To turn our backs on the obscurer colors is to deny the power and array of the lexicon at our disposal.

There must be a middle ground between or betwixt bombastic and bland. Surely in life I can be succinct, but also find moments to be concise, terse, laconic, pithy, brief, brusque, and compendious.

There’s hidden value within each word, no matter how esoteric, arcane, recondite, or rarefied. There’s a place in this world for such sesquipedalian sentence sorters.

So here’s a brief tribute to a few of the words that have inexplicably fallen from our good graces.

“Complaisant,” the long lost — latin-rooted, yet unrelated — cousin of “complacent,” is defined as “willing to please others; obliging; agreeable.” It’s impossible to say aloud without confusing casual listeners, and difficult to write without seeming confused yourself, but I contend that this word has met an undue fate, relegated to a verbal graveyard by an uncourteous, closed-fisted homophone.

“Nonpareil” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “having no match or equal; unrivaled” or “an unrivaled or matchless person or thing.” It’s both a noun and an adjective and, frankly, I think it’s underappreciated in both contexts.

“Zemblanity" is defined as “the inevitable discovery of what we would rather not know; the opposite of serendipity.” For example: “In a twist of zemblanity, he lost the ticket on his way to redeem the prize.”

Similarly, “Antipathy” is the often-forgotten antonym for “sympathy.” “Apathy,” on the other hand, refers to the absense of sympathy, rather than the diametric opposite of it.

“Tintinnabulate” means “to make a ringing sound, like that of a bell. It is often associated with a clear, resonant sound that can be pleasant or heraldic in nature.” And sure, there are certainly simpler substitutes that can be found for it, but does that mean that this woelessly weird word should never be employed at all?

“Chthonic” is an adjective that “refers to or pertains to the deities, spirits, and other beings dwelling under the earth. It describes something that is related to the underworld or the depths of the earth. In a broader sense, chthonic can symbolize the dark, primal, and often hidden aspects of nature and the human psyche.” Though I admit “chthonic” isn’t a word I expect to find a cause for in the near future, it’s one I’m glad at least exists for those rare, rare occasions in which I still might.

“Multifarious” means “having or occurring in great variety; diverse.” This is another word that seems severely underappreciated. It’s hardly less useful than “multifaceted,” and yet, I can’t recall ever hearing it before yesterday.

It’s hard to overstate how arbitrary of a path the evolution of language can often follow. There’s not always a rhyme or reason to the words we choose to favor and assimilate. Just because a word is used today doesn’t mean it won’t be supplanted by a new one again tomorrow. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that languages are alive, and that so many of the words that are regular parts of our vocabulary were once outcasts in distant slang dialects.

There’s certainly a line to toe when we choose each of our words. We don’t want each sentence that we write to read like a riddle. But in the vast world of vocabulary, there are words that can fulfill almost any function. There’s no reason not to periodically use the tools we’re given, even if “fugacious” isn’t typically the most useful one in the shed.

The realm of wordsmithery doesn’t need to be a rigid one. We can occasionally be whisked away into the wonderful world of words without worrying whose wonder we whet. Writing is about wandering along paths untaken. And without a little adventure, how can we really cultivate a voice of our own?