When Only the Right Sesquipedalianism Will Do the Job

Any writer’s purpose is to be understood, so the use of words beyond one’s reader’s understanding is self-defeating.

On the other hand, a writer is obliged to use the word that most accurately expresses his meaning, and the reader, if he does not know it, may look it up.

Occasionally I receive letters from readers complaining that I use words they don’t understand. Usually they are common sesquipedalianisms that anyone with a high school education ought to know.

If, occasionally, out of necessity, I use a word that is unfamiliar to some of my readers, I consider that an invitation for them to consult their dictionaries.

Actually, my vocabulary is very limited. The English language is so abundant that one needn’t know big words to say whatever he means. On the other hand, sometimes a big word expresses an idea that would otherwise take many words, resulting in circumlocution.

In a recent letter a reader complains that he finds my column loaded with words beyond his comprehension. “If I don’t understand some words or phrases I am sure others don’t understand them either,” he says.

He encloses a column with the following words underlined: seascapes, clamorous, brio, proscenium arch, denizens, hirsute, jousted .

“Please don’t tell me,” he goes on, “that I should look it up in a dictionary. What you write may not be in a handy dictionary.”

One needn’t have the Oxford English Dictionary or even Webster’s Third New International at hand. I doubt that I have ever used a word that can’t be found in any desktop dictionary, such as Webster’s Collegiate or Webster’s New World, which is used by The Times for quick reference.

By the way, the name Webster’s on a dictionary is no guarantee of its excellence. It is ironic that Noah Webster himself, author of the first American dictionary, fought for laws to protect his copyright. Today, any publisher that puts a book of words together can call it Webster’s.

Among our Christmas presents was a book sent by Anna Lee Nathan--”The Superior Person’s Second Book of Weird and Wondrous Words” by Peter Bowler. Most of the words in it, I concede, might not be found in desk-top dictionaries; neither would they be found in my column.

Still, they are indeed wonderful. For example, pleniloquence means “a plenitude of talking.” As the book suggests, it aptly describes any session of Congress.

Oligotrophia is a $10 word for lack of nourishment, or hunger. Like many big words, it is unnecessary in ordinary prose. Onychophagy has the same fault. It simply means nail-biting.

There are thousands of words that one is not likely to need in ordinary conversation. For instance, acetabulum , which means “the cup-shaped sucker of a cuttlefish.” On the other hand, we might find a use for ailurophile , which means “someone who is overly fond of cats.” (Oddly, my desk top lists only ailurophobia , “an abnormal fear of cats.”

Some words fall so pleasantly from the tongue that one wishes there were more occasion for their use. For example, mangel - wurzel , which means, alas, a kind of beet root used for cattle food. And it is in my dictionary.

Clinomania is “an excessive desire to stay in bed.” This is probably a common affliction, familiar to most of us, yet the word has not found its way into common use. It does not occur even in Webster’s Third New International, which is supposed to be unabridged.

One wonders why the word exists. Where did Bowler turn it up? If a word is so obscure, what is its purpose? Who needs it? Is there an esoteric group of pedants who use such words?

Still, some of the words in Bowler’s book seem to crystallize ideas that need words. For example, the word hugger - mugger is said to denote “secret, clandestine activity, muddle, and or confusion. . . . “

It seems the perfect word to describe the Iran-Contra scandal, but I don’t remember seeing it in the ruminations of our numerous pundits on that story. It does, however, appear in Webster’s New World Dictionary, which defines it as “a confusion, muddle, jumble. . . . “

As I say, most of the book’s words are ones that we can do without. Yet, who can say? I confess that one word I had never heard of seems to define one of my traits: That’s pleionosis , the exaggeration of one’s own importance.

On the other hand, I also find myself described by the word rhadamanthine --”uncompromisingly just and completely incorruptible.” And it’s in the New World.

Or, perhaps, the word that more closely defines my condition, according to some of my readers, is sophomania --”a delusional state in which the sufferer believes that he or she is a person of exceptional intelligence.”

You could look it up.