You may have noticed my, um, silence on this blog. My father, who served with the U.S. Army in Korea, picked up an expression there that became a family favorite: “I am in Deep Kim Chee.” It means “I’m in trouble” and sums up my situation today. I might also say “I am in Deep Deadline.” My next book is due in three weeks, and I’ve been in deep whatever for the past few months.
But I’ve been stocking up stuff to share with you as soon as I get out of the Kim Chee. For a taste, I thought I’d turn you on to a Web site I found in my research, called Pompous Ass Words.
Dan Fejes started the site more than nine years ago, out of frustration with reporters who rely on words that made him pick up his dictionary one too many times. The straw that broke his back was “risible,” in a Maureen Dowd column. “When I saw that it was completely synonymous with ‘laughable,’”Fejes writes, “I started mentally shouting at the paper: “I WALKED AWAY FROM MY COFFEE FOR THIS?!?!”
Since when should the current story not be current, spoken to and for the common people? On his Web site, Fejes and others track high-falutin words they come across in news stories and have to look up in the dictionary—only to find that they have put down their reading for a word with absolutely no use except to befuddle them. In each case, the obscure word means little more than what another completely legitimate, common word means—down to its shade and shadow. Fejes calls these “pompous ass words,” or, as he otherwise puts it, “words everyone should know about and never use.”
This journalist gets it that reporters and columnists want to sound authoritative. But at the same time, a smarter-than-you approach really doesn’t make sense. The message would be more urgent if it didn’t sound like a history book someone wrote with a feather pen in a dusty library.
“While I understand the complaints of those who think it’s anti-intellectual,” Fejes wrote me in e-mail, “I respectfully disagree. Choosing the right words for the right audience is important. There’s a time and a place for ornate language. You can be in favor of the simplest, most functional language in everyday use without it being a call for a descent into monosyllabic grunting or lolspeak. Sometimes the simplest, most functional language is pretty complex.”
Hear, hear—and thanks to my research assistant, Ava Sayaka Rosen, who has been helping me on the pompous ass words front.
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Posted in Blog | 4 Comments »
August 8th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
I’ll give Pompous Ass Words the benefit of the doubt, that inkhorn words sometimes add nothing to expressiveness, but I recoil at any approach that limits the possibilities of language, in all its eloquent, floral, and funky varieties. It’s bad enough our language of appraisal is down to a dichotomy of “awesome” or “sucks,” or a “like” button. Fancy words can deliver the delights of sound, texture, nuance, and amusing associations—even if they essentially have the same dictionary meaning as a so-called plain word. Are we to be suspect and subversive if we take risks with language, going for the unexpected locution? Let’s hope not.
August 10th, 2011 at 1:40 pm
Thanks for this comment, Art, and you know I agree with you wholeheartedly on, first, always seeking the most precise word possible; second, seeking nuance, connotation, texture; third, striving to make music, which often means taking a fancy word that has just the right number of beats, or just the right vowel sounds, or consonants that allow for alliteration.
Not to split hairs, but isn’t there a different between pompous and fancy? Fejes’s example of “risible” is a good one–unless it adds the right music or varies the diction, I don’t think it’s better than “laughable.” Just as “domicile” is not better than “home” unless there is something other than meaning to recommend it.
Meantime, for anyone reading this, check out Art’s book, “Better Than Great: A Plenitudinous Compendium of Wallopingly Fresh Superlatives,” which makes a terrific case for the elegant (and precise) variation! It’s way too enjoyable and well-written to be pompous!
October 9th, 2011 at 7:24 am
Hi Constance;
To a francophone the word “risible” would not seem pompous and it has the same meaning in French as in English. However, the other day, I came across the word “equitation”. Now there’s a word that should not be used with a western saddle.
February 14th, 2012 at 7:54 pm
I’m coming to this late, apologies.
I saw the “risible” in Dowd’s column and though it was just the right touch. Superficially the word has the same meaning as “laughable” but it lacks the sense of ludicrousness embedded in “laughable”.