Pretty words are jewels we pick up as we walk along the shoreline of our reading. It’s okay to pick them up, admire them, and let the light sparkle in their facets before putting them in a pocket, possibly never to be seen again except in our memory.
Or, put another way, pulchritudinous lexemes are the bijoux of brilliance aggregated during our sandy perambulations of perusal.
Okay, so the parody example was so over-the-top pretentious that even I didn’t want to “translate” any further, and I’m sure you wouldn’t have wanted to read it, either. The only fun part of writing that was getting to show off that I know the plural of bijou is bijoux, not bijous, but even I’d want to face punch someone who’s being that much of a know-it-all.
Technically, the parody means the same thing as the introductory sentence, and they’re all words that are in my and your vocabulary, but do they have the same feeling? We both know the answer to that. The parody is made up of a lot of pretty, glittering words and yet it could hardly be uglier.
Pulchritudinous has been in my vocabulary since I learned it from a word-of-the-day calendar in my freshman year of college. That means I’ve known it for over 30 years, and yet not a single time in my life have I ever found a sentence it made prettier than the word “pretty.” I call it a “wallflower word,” a word that sits leaning against the wall of the gym at prom waiting desperately to get picked to dance but never chosen.
Lexeme is a term of art that I used to use regularly, but that was when I worked at a dictionary. We used the word lemma all the time (it’s the word for a word) and even though we were in an environment where all of us were word nerds, we still pluralized it as lemmas instead of the proper lemmata. Even know-it-alls don’t like know-it-alls.
And as much as I have a weakness for perambulation, I have never found a place to drop it in one of my novels. I have to capitulate to my penchant for perambulation (dialed up the pretentiousness with a dash of alliteration, didn’t I?) by occasionally using it at home in a humorous way to describe when my border collie is wandering the back yard aimlessly sniffing away instead of coming straight back in after micturition—err, taking a leak.
Let’s tone down the second example and make one small change:
Pretty words are jewels we pick up as we walk along the shoreline of our reading.
Pretty words are jewels we pick up as we perambulate along the shoreline of our reading.
Is the second one enhanced by the pretty word? You’re entitled to your own opinion, but my opinion is no.
How about if we try dropping in a French word? After all, everyone knows that a dollop of French makes everything très elegant:
Pretty words are jewels we pick up as we walk along the shoreline of our reading.
Pretty words are bijoux we pick up as we walk along the shoreline of our reading.
Again, you have the right to think so, but it’s still a no from me.
Does this mean there’s never a time when a two-dollar word beats out a dime-a-dozen one? I’m a member of Mensa and a grad student in literature at an Ivy League school, and yet every novel I’ve written (including the one I’m working on now) consistently scores an 82 on the Flesch Reading Ease scale. A higher score means more readable, and an 82 means 6th– to 7th-grade level. Is there any hope for perambulate?
Sure there is. In fact, let me show you how an expensive word that’s also French can make things better. Here’s a scene from the novel I’m working on now. It’s a book told through the diary of the protagonist, and here’s an excerpt of one of her entries:
I’ve been so focused on the fact that we’re going to be losing dad that I haven’t been able to look through that barrier. And ever since I’ve been on the meds, I haven’t felt like I’ve been angry enough about that. I should be wailing and gnashing my teeth and rending my garments over this, and instead it’s been a halfhearted mélange of sadness and self-pity instead of a worthy rage against the dying of his light.
Mélange has been in my vocabulary so long that I can’t even remember where I absorbed it. But over all my books, I’ve written over 1.1 million words, and only now have I found a chance to use it. It’s quite literally a one-in-a-million word. Let’s do another side-by-side comparison:
a halfhearted mélange of sadness and self-pity
a halfhearted mixture of sadness and self-pity
Mixture works, but mélange is le mot juste here: the perfect word. Mélange carries a connotation of lumpiness and not-quite-blendedness that mixture does not.
This week’s inspiration activity is two-fold. First, when you’re going over your own work (as I’ve said before, don’t do this at the draft stage if it slows you down), see if every word you’re using is worth its cost. If you’re asking the reader to cough up two dollars for a word, ask yourself if you’re giving them at least two dollars of perfection in return. Don’t force artisanal when you can pluck straight garden-variety.
Second, take one of your favorite words and craft a paragraph around it. For example, I intentionally make sure that each one of my books has one (and only one) sentence with the word languid in it. That’s designed as a bit of an in-joke so readers who read all of my work can have a little bit of fun picking it out. It’s my way of showing thanks for sticking with me. But for this activity, don’t try to write something you’ll use; just do it for the fun of it. When you’re done, savor the chance to have pulled one of those jewels out of your pocket. Then once you’ve had a chance to enjoy it, ask yourself if a less expensive word is actually better.
Have fun and bonne chance!
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