Using Big Words and Ignoring Your Teacher's Bad Advice

Brad Leithauser posted an article entitled "Unusable Words" in The New Yorker. His advice will be useful for those of you who plan to use big, fancy words in your writing.

In the three decades I’ve been teaching, I find that the subset of students is steadily increasing who consider nearly all words of three or more syllables pretentious, with the exception of “pretentious”—which is for them an indispensable term. Meanwhile, in recent years, a word I’ve always been fond of—“artisanal”—has been swallowed by an enormous maw. Its fine associations of individual tooling and subtle calibration—the craftsman’s guild—have all but vanished. The word has been devoured by fast-food franchises, supermarkets, junk-food confectioners; any day now I’ll spot on some diner menu artisanal s’mores, artisanal pigs in a blanket.

So, what's the take-home message? Here's what I think: Prof. Leithauser's ideas, if warranted, suggest that you should probably do a bit of research on a new word before you use it. Simply knowing the definition is not enough--you'd have to have some idea of how commonly that word is employed, when it is usually used, and what its connotations and associations are before you "make it your own".

Some of my high school teachers used to discourage us from using "big" words so we would not sound "pretentious". Although their advice has some bearing on decent writing, it's also freaking lazy. For instead of teaching us how to use new words, they simply tell us to avoid such words so we won't sound like wannabe grownups. Bad advice.


Not only had such pedagogical laziness messed up our writing, it had dumbed down our reading, rendering our chances of joining the muckety-mucks at prestigious schools bleak and our academic performance at such schools inadequate. I've held a grudge against my eighth grade social studies teacher ever since he declared in class,"If I tell you to do research, would you want to read something written by a Harvard PhD? Of course not. Why would you read something you won't understand?" That's all cool, dude. But you better know what to say to those parents when they come into the next PTA meeting complaining about why none of their kids ever get admitted to Ha-vuhd.

To be sure, most of our classmates seemed to have been hopelessly incapable of understanding even a Wikipedia article, but the relative linguistic ineptitude of the majority should never be reason for teachers to skimp on quality academic content. Why? Well, to put it bluntly, there are still a few smart students in class. And of the rest of the students who aren't that smart, there are plenty who are willing to work their culos off. So, if you belong to either one of those groups and hear such stupid reading/writing advice from your teachers, screw your teachers and their advice and get to work!