Do small words beat big ones?

Most people consider simple language more truthful. That’s a fallacy we all can use.

Fellow Soulbender Patrick Gibbons, who teaches communication at Notre Dame’s Mendoza business school, sent me an essay titled “Big Words Are for the Birds.” It consists entirely of one-syllable words; I’ve pasted it at the end of this post. (Thanks, Pat!)

The essay reminds me of Winston Churchill’s call for using Anglo-Saxon words as much as possible, eschewing those of foreign origin such as Greek, Latin, and French. He was hardly expressing an original opinion. Ancient Greeks railed against fancy “Asianist” terms that flowed in from the East. The ancient Romans in turn distrusted the big words that Latin borrowed from Greece. And I’m convinced that Democrats’ love of highfalutin language costs them elections.

Just for fun, I asked Chat GPT to rewrite that previous paragraph using words of one syllable. It gave me this:

“The piece makes me think of when Winston said to use short, old words more, and not those from far lands: Greek, Latin, and French. He was not the first to say this. Old Greeks did not like show-off “Asian” words that came from the East. The old folks in Rome did not trust the long words that Latin took from Greece. And I feel sure that Dems’ wish for flash talk makes them lose votes.”

I’m not sure “old folks in Rome” is a good swap for “ancient Romans.” Still, the AI bot did make some decent suggestions; I mean, sound hints. (Gee, short words are hard!)

Personally, every rewrite I do tends to simplify things. I’m currently going through the final draft of my next book with my editor at Penguin Random House. Each draft seems to reduce the number of multisyllabic terms. And each draft definitely reads better.

There’s a reason for this. Simplicity brings clarity. Even more importantly, plain speaking sounds more like the truth. Most people trust short words and look with suspicion at grandiloquent rodomontades. Ancient rhetoricians actually had a word for a device that deliberately obscures the truth: skotison. That’s Greek for “darken it.” If you want to sound profound while disguising the actual meaning, use big fancy words and lots of technical terms known only to the select cognoscenti.

Skotison has destroyed the morale of many a college English student. She reads Joyce’s Ulysses and, hoping to decipher that big puzzle of a novel, attends a lecture by a professor who ejaculates “implied authors” and “reification” and “curtal passages.” (Curtal means “brief” or “simple,” ironically.)

Rhetoric demands that we honor, or exploit, our audiences’ greater trust for simplicity. As the German humanist Christoph Martin Wieland put it:

“To be not as eloquent would be more eloquent.”

That’s a translation from the German. I asked AI to translate the translation into monosyllables:

“To speak less fine is to speak more fine.”

I’ll give that a one-syllable (albeit Yiddish) review: Meh.

As a word lover yourself, you know it’s a fallacy to equate simplicity with truth. In a previous post, I wrote about H.L. Mencken, one of America’s great truthtellers and a writer with a laudably behemothic vocabulary. Personally, I love the bounteous cornucopia of our burgeoning tongue and savor the mouthfeel of an occasional foreignism. (My mother, who learned French at a fancy private school, once told me I had a gift for the mot juste. It gave me such a frisson!)

My daughter inherited my lexicographical jones. Dorothy Jr. has a vast vocabulary enlarged by a career in medicine. But no one cuts more to the chase, wordwise. She can explain complicated ailments in the simplest crystalline terms.

Even as a little kid, she showed a precocious gift for the simple and direct.

Dorothy Jr. and George in a moment of relative calm.

One day, her annoying little brother drove her almost to violence. As Dorothy drew back her fist, her mother intervened. “Use your words!”

Dorothy considered, then said exactly the right thing: “This is going to hurt.”

---

Exercise: In the future I’ll use the following technique to edit the knottier paragraphs in my own stuff. It might work even better for writing classes. It’s one way of getting around the problem of students cheating with AI. Please let me know in the comments what you think.

1. Write a draft paragraph; or, heck, prompt your favorite AI bot to draft it for you.

2. Try to convert each multisyllabic or foreign term into the simplest possible English. Or ask AI to do that as well.

3. Compare the two, sentence by sentence. Which seems clearer, more approachable, and compelling?

4. Create a final draft.

---

Here’s the essay that Patrick Gibbons sent me. Written by Joseph A. Ecclesine, it appeared in the book Printer’s Ink, a collection from the University of Michigan published in 1961.

Big Words Are for the Birds

When you come right down to it, there is no law that says you have to use big words when you write or talk.

There are lots of small words, and good ones, that can be made to say all the things you want to say, quite as well as the big ones. It may take a bit more time to find them at first, but it can be well worth it (since we all know what they mean). Some small words, more than you think, are rich with just the right feel, the right taste, as if made to help you say a thing the way it should be said.

Small words can be crisp, brief, terse – they go right to the point, like a knife. They have a charm all their own. They dance, twist, turn, and sing. Like sparks in the night, they light the way for the eyes of those who read. They are the grace notes of prose. You know what they say the same way you know a day is bright and clear – at first sight. You find, as you read, that you like the way they say it. Small words are fun. They can catch large thoughts and hold them for all to see, like rare stones in rings of gold, or joy in the eyes of a child. Some make you “feel,” as well as see: the cold deep dark of night, the hot salt sting of tears.

Small words move with ease where big words stand still (or worse, bog down and get in the way of what you want to say.) In all truth, there is not much that small words will not say and say quite well.