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Good Words and Bad Words

by William Zinsser, May 28, 2009 9:52 AM
I love short words and short sentences. I go to work every day grateful for the strong and simple verbs and nouns bequeathed to the wonderful English language by its Anglo-Saxon heritage, just as I hate the long and pompous words derived from Latin, its other principal source — words like "implemenation," which have no movement or life. I always choose short words over long words that mean the same thing. "Assistance" means "help." "Numerous" means "many." "Currently" means "now." An "individual" is a man or a woman or a child. Some of my sentences have so many one-syllable words that I could be arrested for sending them out into the world. When I read aloud to students a sentence that I love for its simple strength — perhaps by Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Thoreau — they think I'm kidding. They can't believe that simple is good. "If I write like that, people will think I'm stupid," they say. Stupid — I tell them — like E. B. White and the King James Bible.

But I also love to find a long or unusual word that's exactly right for the situation — one that I know will please the reader with its unexpectedness; surprise is the most refreshing commodity in nonfiction writing. Here are three sentences from my book Writing Places that gave me pleasure when they finally fell into place:

I was one of the first magazine writers to go to San Francisco in the winter of 1967 and bring back news of the 'love hippies' who had descended on the Haight-Ashbury district, decked out in 'ecstatic dress' and drugged out on LSD — flower children running away from their parents in the slumbering suburbs. I had no way of knowing that I had climbed aboard a wave that would move at tsunami speed. By June it had washed a huge tide of ragged postulants to San Francisco, where they camped out on the streets for a 'summer of love' that the city's safety and health authorities hope never to see the likes of again.

Beyond the small felicities — the alliterations and metaphors — that give the paragraph its sense of enjoyment, the idea that I was having a good time stitching it together — I really like "postulants." It's maybe my favorite word in the whole book. I don't think I've ever used it before, but it sprang from some recess of my mind when I was looking for a word to describe young men and women eager for admission to a religious order. I like to find precise words from a special discipline, like religion or medicine or music or carpentry, and use them in a general context.

Last March I wrote a piece for the New York Times on the Sunday before the opening of the baseball season, timed to the much-ballyhooed unveiling of the new Yankee Stadium and the Mets' new Citi Field. One paragraph said:

I assume that the new stadiums will feature the newest advances in audio-visual assault. I stopped going to Mets games at Shea Stadium when my friend Dick Smolens and I could no longer hear each other talk between innings — such was the din of amplified music and blather from the giant screen in center field. But baseball is also a game of silences. Every half-inning it invites its parishioners to meditate on what they have just seen and to recall other players they once saw performing similar feats. Memory is the glue that holds the game together.

Again, from the vocabulary of religion, "parishioners" is my favorite word in the article. It has the precise meaning of a like-minded group of people assembled in temple for a sacred ritual. One more dip into the liturgical soup: in Writing Places I recall several magazine editors who kept me busy with writing assignments. "Pamela Fiori, editor of Town & Country, which for a century had catechized its readers on the manners of the Eastern establishment, found me useful as her house WASP, a writer born into that milieu who knew its curious customs." Maybe that sentence will catechize a few writers in the benefits of surprise.

Medicine is also rich in special terminology waiting to be put to general use — all those words like "sclerotic" and "stenosis" that doctors so glibly throw at us. Fifty years later I still remember a sentence by S. J. Perelman that mentioned the peristaltic prose of the columnist Max Lerner. No amount of time spent rummaging in your brain for exactly the right word is misspent; your readers will smile at your effort to please them — always a good day's work. (Two English writers who keep me smiling over their choice of words are John Banville and the late John Mortimer. )

What I most fear is pomposity. I never write anything I wouldn't comfortably say in conversation, and I have a long mental list of those verbal mountebanks. "Quotidian." I just don't think of myself as going about my quotidian chores. "Scudding." Words that are only used in poetry should stay there; I've never heard anyone talk about clouds scudding across the sky. "The human condition." Isn't that what we used to call life — men and women and children contending with the Job-like trials of being alive? We're all stuck with the human condition. "Postmodern." I'll buy it as a scholarly term defining a specific period in art and architecture. But how about the postmodern sensibility that everyone except me seems to have? If "postmodern" follows "modern," doesn't it become the new modern? Or is there no more modern?

That's my existential dilemma of the day. Whatever that means.




Books mentioned in this post

Inventing the Truth The Art & Craft of Memoir

William Zinsser

On Writing Well The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

William Zinsser

Writing Places The Life Journey of a Writer & Teacher

William K Zinsser
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3 Responses to "Good Words and Bad Words"

Prisca May 29, 2009 at 12:03 PM
This was an interesting blog-post I'll probably keep in my mind for a while. Thank you for reminding us that striving for simplicity may prove much more fruitful than attempting to find the most difficult, unknown word synonymous to the one you first thought of. I remember when I began high school my method to an A in English was to replace all of the words in my paper with their ridiculously obnoxious synonyms which I of course had never used in speech let alone heard of before. Ahh...the sound of a hopelessly pedantic paper. In any case, I enjoyed reading this blog-post very much.

Kurt May 28, 2009 at 04:36 PM
Do teachers still asign composition homework by the word like they did when I was in school? I think that was the source of a lot of the verbal overkill in writers of a certain age. so..."Our existential task in this post-modern era, is to synergistically create a new paradigm, outside the box, which will alow a sustainable future of diversity."

Karen May 28, 2009 at 10:54 AM
The English language is rich with words. I think students are surprised by the usefulness of small, precise words, rather than the layering of adjectives and adverbs, to express a point or create an image. In a recent piece I was writing, I needed to know the words that describe waves coming to shore. What a delight to consider lapping, rolling, roiling, breaking, crashing, and the like to find the precise word for the moment I was trying to convey.

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