The Internet woke up to its latest controversy some days ago. Somewhere on social media, a garrulous post was being shared and reshared; someone somewhere had read the word ‘scrying’, hadn’t quite understood it, and lambasted anyone who used the word as committing a sort of verbal violence. The suggestion being that the correct option was to use the words ‘fortune telling’. Whether the original poster was being ironic or not is unclear.
The post flew around the Internet like wildfire; unfamiliar words, we were told, are ableist. The argument built to include people with dyslexia, people who are neurodivergent, oppressed caste or marginalized people who never got the education to build a large vocabulary. Stop showing off, the writer is told. If you don’t, you’re excluding a majority of readers.
It would be easy to laugh this off. It would also be a mistake, because there is a real grievance buried inside the overreach, and pretending otherwise just guarantees that both sides talk past each other.
It’s undeniable that language can exclude, and the most well meaning writer or speaker might use words that put everyone off; Shashi Tharoor for instance, has been mocked for using high – falutin (yet precise) words, that most of India would need a dictionary to parse. Not everyone has the linguistic wherewithal to grapple with difficult words, and the educationally marginalized and people with learning disabilities largely bear the brunt of this, especially when ableist words such as ‘tone-deaf’ or ‘falling on deaf ears’ are used. Someone who grew up in an under-resourced school, or who is still building fluency in a second language, is not being lazy when faced with a paragraph of dense prose. Access to a large vocabulary is not equal; for everyone who grew up with a vast library of books at home, there’s someone who had to scrounge for access to a library card. And so it would be pusillanimous to deny that language is exclusivist.
But perhaps it could also be condescending. To assume that a person isn’t willing, or able to understand or learn new words constitutes an even worse violence, that of mollycoddling a reader simply because the writer thinks they can’t do better. Actual disability advocates have spent years arguing against exactly this move: the tendency to speak for disabled people as a uniform, fragile bloc rather than as individuals with wildly different needs, preferences, and capacities. After all, sometimes the most appropriate word is in fact, ‘scrying’, and not ‘fortune telling’, and that’s okay.
Readers of this piece may or may not struggle with the use of the word ‘pusillanimous’, a perfectly understandable position. But perhaps a hard word is not a door bolted shut. Perhaps it is a narrow corridor that opens into a magnificent library. A reader who doesn’t know ‘scrying’ or pusillanimous’ can google it in a minute, and then have the satisfaction of growing in a small, but significant way. It’s a strange kind of solidarity that assumes the person on the other end of the sentence is too fragile to reach for a dictionary.
Bland-washing language at a time when the Western world is reportedly facing a crisis of literacy is a sad irony. Besides, one might argue, a piece of writing becomes flat and bone-dry without the flourish of language. For everyone who extols the spare writing of Ernest Hemingway, there’s someone who thrills at the maximalist prose of Salman Rushdie. Both can, and must, co-exist. In this way, we can deepen and enrich our thinking.
So what is a writer to do? Of course there is no perfect prescription for writing, but it does behove us to use ‘bereft’, because the word ‘sad’ just doesn’t mean the same thing at all. Those two obligations point in different directions, and a writer serious about language has to sit with both instead of collapsing into either the ‘vocabulary is a weapon’ camp or the “difficulty is always innocent” camp. Precision in language is not a hostile act, but condescension might be.
At the end of the day, the actual question was never about using big words or small words. It was always about the right word — and sometimes the right word is the hardest one of all.
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