They must have thought that any word other than "supercalifrajerlistic" is simple and easy to understand ...
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Why use big words when simple ones will do? (Sunday Times, 11 Feb 07)
ON WORDS by Janadas Devan
THE new National Kidney Foundation's civil suit against its former officials, which wound down last week, was linguistically productive.
About five weeks ago, we had a tussle over the word 'cronies' when the NKF's lead counsel, Mr K. Shanmugam, used it in his opening statement to describe former NKF chairman Richard Yong and former treasurer Loo Say San. And a week ago, we had a lesson on when not to use 'big words'.
Mr Shanmugam was questioning Mr Yong about a letter he had written to former NKF director Matilda Chua, congratulating her on her work and informing her that her salary was to be raised. The writing 'didn't sound like your language', Mr Shanmugam told Mr Yong. It wasn't. Evidently, Mr T.T. Durai had drafted the letter and Mr Yong had signed it, though he didn't understand some of its language.
The letter read in part: 'You have laboured extremely hard into the late hours of the night for the past few months without regard to your impending parturition. You have been able to coalesce a team of relentless beavers who were determined to make this (NKF Charity Show) reach an iconic status. The success of the Show also douses the remaining embers of doubts prevailing in the minds of some of the members of the public.'
Mr Shanmugam focused on the word 'parturition'. Mr Yong, on the witness stand, said he thought it referred to Ms Chua's impending departure from the NKF. It means, of course, 'the action of giving birth to young'. Female mammals of any variety can be parturient. They don't all have to work in the NKF, thank goodness - or leave it, for that matter, in order to deliver a baby.
But why 'your impending parturition' instead of simply 'your pregnancy'? And why 'coalesce', 'beavers', 'iconic status' and 'embers of doubts'? Mr Yong might be forgiven for not knowing 'parturition', but why would anyone want to sign (or write) a letter encrusted with these other strange eruptions?
Let's begin by rewriting the letter. That would give us an idea of why good writing is not a matter of rifling through the thesaurus for ponderous substitutes for simple words:
'You have worked hard over the past few months despite your pregnancy. You gathered an effective team to make the NKF Charity Show a success. The Show's success reassured some sceptical members of the public.'
That was 35 words compared to Mr Durai's 71 - and not a single word among them would be unclear to someone less educated than Mr Yong.
Would anyone reading the redraft say: 'This writer doesn't write as well as Mr Durai; he doesn't use big words I don't understand'?
As it so happens, there is evidence to suggest that the opposite would be the case. As was reported in The Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere last year, an interesting study by Princeton University psychologist Daniel M. Oppenheimer has established that needlessly complex language does not impress people. Rather, it puts them off.
Dr Oppenheimer had asked 71 Stanford University students to evaluate different writing samples. The language in the samples was systematically varied, with each student 'getting either a 'moderately complex' or a 'highly complex' version of each sample'. The complex versions were created by replacing every noun, verb and adjective in the simpler ones 'with the longest possible synonym'.
As Dr Oppenheimer reported in his amusingly titled paper - Consequences Of Erudite Vernacular Utilised Irrespective Of Necessity: Problems With Using Long Words Needlessly - the more flowery the sample, the lower was the students' estimation of the writer's intelligence.
'It's important to point out that this research is not about problems with using long words but about using long words needlessly,' Dr Oppenheimer cautioned. But 'one thing seems certain: write as simply and plainly as possible and it's more likely you'll be thought of as intelligent'.
If more evidence is needed to confirm the wisdom of that advice, consider the following tongue-in-cheek version of the same advice that I came across on a business-writing website: 'Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vaniloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendres, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant or apparent.'
Who would you think is smarter: Dr Oppenheimer or the writer of the above passage (if he or she had meant it seriously)?
THERE are more than a million words in the English language. Every English-speaker knows many more words than he or she assumes. According to the linguist David Crystal, 'it is unusual to find someone with an active vocabulary of less than 35,000 words and a passive vocabulary of less than 50,000. For someone who has been through higher education, who mixes in literate circles, and who reads a lot, the levels are twice as high.'
So why shouldn't one exploit this rich word hoard - substitute 'parturient woman' for 'pregnant woman', 'douse the embers of doubt' for 'reassure', 'expatiate' for 'speak' or 'write', 'choleric' for 'angry', and so on?
Because they are not exact synonyms. In fact, there are very few words in the English language 'which are exact synonyms (like autumn in British English and fall in American English)', as Dr Crystal notes. And there are even fewer antonyms - like good and bad.
In the examples above, 'expatiate' cannot be an exact synonym for 'speak', for it means 'speak or write at great length' (for example, Gibbon expatiated on the fall of the Roman Empire; I can only speak about it). 'Choleric' cannot be an exact synonym for 'angry', for it implies being irascible, irritable and bad-tempered, not merely angry. And 'parturient' cannot be an exact synonym for 'pregnant', for it refers to a female mammal about to give birth (Ms Chua may have been pregnant for nine months, but she couldn't possibly have been parturient for that long.)
There is a reason why there are more than a million words in English. Reality is infinitely complex, thought subtle and feelings wondrously various. Every English-speaker should indeed try to expand his or her word hoard to be equal to this complexity, subtlety and variety. But he or she also has a duty to apply that hoard precisely.
There are many words which I adore for their sounds, but which I have never been able to use: 'triste', for example, meaning 'sad, melancholy, dreary'; or 'polygonal', a mathematical term for a figure with many angles and sides, but which can also be used figuratively (as in 'polygonal appeal'). Though I know these words, I've never used them for there has been no occasion to do so.
As it so happens, I may finally get a chance to use one of my favourites - 'kakistocracy' (pronounced kack-i-stah-kruh-see), meaning 'government by its worst citizens'.
The old NKF, one might say now, was a kakistocracy.
janadas@sph.com.sg
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