There are two types of people who use "big words": Those who are trying to sound smarter than they are, and those who are so intimately familiar with the English language that they understand the subtle shadings of each word and can't help but use them fluently.

English is often cited as an unusual language for the word count it has. What English has done is load a lot of connotations that in other languages might show in phrases or idioms into the words themselves. In the thesaurus, "conflagration" and "fire" are synonyms, but in fact they don't mean quite the same thing. One is a thing you might cook marshmallows over and the other certainly is not.

Those in the second category can identify those in the first with a glance. Sometimes you can even see them flinch if you're looking at them at the right time, when someone claims to have roasted their marshmallows over a conflagration.

The author is a professional writer and a professor, presumably of English or Writing. She comes by it honestly. If any of the vocabulary in that piece struck me on first reading (before I read your comment), I actually thought she was talking down to her students when she told the story about Mary.

(I am sure Muphry's Law is in full effect for this post.)

Thank you for this comment.

I started talking like that when I was younger as, I believe, a direct result of reading 6-7 books a week. The language would just surface as I was in the middle of a sentence. That language was quickly derided by my peers and those "above" me.

I found that conversing in a more general manner ("fire" vs "conflagration") is conducive to moving conversations forward, even if it results in a muddled understanding.

I now make efforts to speak in a less exact fashion in most circumstances and I've lost a good bit of my vocabulary as a result.

On occasion I write (privately) in such language so that I retain the ability to speak in a more exacting fashion, but it's rare these days and I often feel like I'm not presenting my arguments as well as I could be.

I had the same problem, especially because I loved learning words, I managed to satisfy my hunger for words by practicing different dialects in the area and working them in and out of my speech which was a lot of fun and people didn't notice/mind. Later I learned a second language which was a great outlet for that hunger.

I came to a similar solution as you, and am on my way to becoming a polyglot (English, French, Spanish, Russian and Swedish/Norweigan). I even started learning Na'vi, but the person I was learning it with wasn't as into it, so it got dropped.

I believe this has also driven my adoption of languages like Haskell and Clojure, While making it easier for me to pick up languages such as Java and Obj-C.

Don't repress yourself.

Better still, speak to your audience's level. Set a high bar by default, but don't maintain it to the detriment of communication.

I agree with this, and believe it has implications for being able to communicate well and give greater precedence to the ideas one is presenting. ie: being able to grok someone else's though process to the level of allowing them to reach your conclusion on their own.

In other words, repress repression.

There are also two types of writing. Writing to convey a point and writing poetically. This is supposed to be advice so it would suit it more to be understandable rather than beautiful.

Having said that I assumed she was making a joke in the first paragraph, she seems to calm down a lot after that. Surely the irony of

> I’ve seen young writers contort their prose into incomprehensibly pretentious muddles, all in a disastrous bid to sound more erudite than they are.

is apparent to the author.

I'm not sure why it should be, as there's no irony to be found. That sentence is neither contorted nor incomprehensible nor a muddle nor a disaster. One might argue on the issue of whether it's pretentious, but given the target audience of other academics I would lean towards saying it's not.

The sentence is contorted. It's correct, but that doesn't mean it's not contorted - it scans poorly and is not particularly readable.

The sentence is perfectly readable.

"Never use a big word where a diminutive one shall suffice" is also 'perfectly readable', but not as readable as the original phrase.

The game reviews over at gametrailers.com suffer from this. I cringe every time they use a vocab-word in place of its pedestrian synonym. While it's a synonym, it's not quite what the word implies.

I think that her words are just on the right side of the line. It would be tough to make it more florid without sounding pretentious, but it seems fine at the moment.

Here's an example of the kind of uncontrollable logorrhoea that she's talking about:

"Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account."

That's from the George Orwell essay "Politics and the English Language" (I'm sure you're familiar with it - snarf) and it's a rewording of the following Bible verse

"I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all."

I've never been happy with that Bible verse. To my mind, winning the race defines swiftness and winning the battle defines strength. The verse starts with two paradoxical examples, then shifts gears into three whines about unrecognised merit (which don't strike me as matters of chance). What is it actually trying to say? I write the point about swiftness and strength thus

The race is to the swift and the battle to the strong but the odds are never so short as the bookmaker offers and when the sea take the unsinkable ship with no lifeboats everybody drowns.

If you take that verse in context (Ecclesiastes 9), you'll see that Solomon is lamenting the fact that "time and chance" ultimately negate any individual merit (strength and swiftness) in the long run (since in the end we all die). The swiftest runner could trip or pull a muscle, and in the chaos of battle anything could happen. Take David Vs. Goliath. Solomon's own father defeated the stronger opponent. Other circumstances of chance can change the tides of war, too.

It's interesting to note that after Solomon became wise, he began to fall into something of an existential angst. I think that shows in this passage.

Gladwell's Outliers is a good read on how time (timing) and chance (opportunity) have far more effect on success than innate ability.

He may even have had that passage in mind when he wrote: "The biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work".

Winning the battle defines the victor, not the strong.

You just used my favorite word (sesquipedalian) haha

That said, it sounds like she struggles with it too (and clearly did with the article):

  “The first time I ever witnessed Mary do that,”
  I continue, “I swore to myself I’d follow her 
  example, I’d be that brave. Guess how I’ve done?”

  They raise their eyebrows, half-hopeful, half-leery.

  “Not that great,” I confess. “It’s ridiculous! I 
  still do it sometimes! Less often, but yes – from 
  time to time, I still catch myself faking it!”

I think for most people it's something you work at. Still, an article as an example of something it's railing against = funny.

I think the first sentence is clumsy. "Fancify," really? The second sentence looks fine to me though. "Erudite" is a bit pretentious, but I could chalk it up to irony there.

I cannot believe you think "erudite" sounds pretentious. It sounds normal.

I said "a bit."

It read to me as over-written, much as the ideas within the article were over-stated.

Did you actually have any problem understanding it? I suspect that you didn't.