For any writer, no matter whether or not you are new or seasoned, one thing we all have to take into account when writing a book is the use of appropriate words. There is always a danger of a writer showing off, intentionally or otherwise, by using certain words simply because he or she is familiar with them and likely uses them whenever conversing with people in his or her daily life, instead of making use of a Thesaurus, looking for alternatives.
What do I mean by this? To illustrate my point the following part of a sentence in a book I am currently re-reading by one well known author, quite literally puts words into the mouth of his chief character, which simply were not in use during the time period the story is set in. “They came swarming downstream, transports filled with palace servants and slaves and all…
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Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
I tried posting this over on Jack Eason’s blog as well, but it seems to be in his moderation bin. Chris, hope it makes it through here! 🙂
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The case you’re speaking of seems rather specialized: it seems to be supposedly the spoken dialogue of a character speaking in 17th Century English? I’d expect there’d be lots of inaccuracies in something like that which wouldn’t be particularly important unless the book purported to reproducing the speaking style/vocabulary of the time accurately.
What I thought your column was going to be about was the inappropriate use of uncommon words either incorrectly or when a common one would really do just as well. I always feel a bit sad when I’m reading something by someone who seems to believe that they can pull just any old “synonym” out of a dictionary or thesaurus and use it to make themselves seem smart. Usually it has the opposite effect since the particular fine connotations carried along with the unusual word are likely *not* at all appropriate in the context where it is stuck.
I have a large vocabulary and pretty good ear for appropriateness of use, but I gained that largely from reading the original works of Dickens, A. Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc etc etc all through grade school. I simply absorbed the language and vocabulary by osmosis. It’s much harder if you don’t have a background like that and are looking at a list of words that you’ve almost never seen or heard before and which all mean ALMOST the same thing. Pick the wrong one and you’ll be a naked emperor!
And even when you ARE using a word correctly, if it’s TOO uncommon it’s usually smart to think twice about who your reading audience will be and whether it might be better to go with something a bit more widely known. Plug your word into a site like:
http://www.wordandphrase.info/frequencyList.asp
to see if it ranks in the top 25 or 50 thousand: there are a heckuva lot of people running around out there with 10,000 to 20,000 word working vocabularies. Once you start throwing in words beyond the 50k point you can pretty much guarantee that a fair portion of your readership will be guessing at your meaning and will start getting ticked off if they encounter the problem in every page or two of text.
– MJM, soliciting sclerotic sesquipedalians sporting sarcastically saturnine solipsisms
P.S. One of the nice things about that word frequency site is that it shows you where the word you’re checking on appears with various frequencies. A theoretically more common word that’s rarely spoken and appears mainly in academic sources is less likely to be known by the average person than a less common word that appears a lot in speech, magazines, and newspapers.
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Hi Michael, like me, Jack moderates all comments, so I’m sure you’ll see it soon. 🙂
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