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OTOH, I recently heard a speaker talk about improving your writing, and she used "bewildered" as an example of an arcane or willfully highfalutin word. This le

• julius_geezer 16y ago
  Some years ago overseas I spoke to a couple, residents of Switzerland, who were looking through a novel of John Irving's; their English was very fluent, both having lived in English-speaking countries, but they had not run across the word "smitten"--though when I explained it and the use, they saw the etymology at once. We ran through a list of other words he had underlined, and I was surprised at how "literary" John Irving is; I had never thought of him as a writer who reaches for odd words, but every 10 pages there was a word you'd never hear in conversation.