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The poetry I like is by nature beautiful. Beauty is not created by taking a thesaurus and shaking it upside-down over your keyboard. Are you morose? Perhaps yo
by strken 2y ago
The poetry I like is by nature beautiful. Beauty is not created by taking a thesaurus and shaking it upside-down over your keyboard.
Are you morose? Perhaps you are sad, very sad in fact, but find that you are neither glum nor morose, not disheartened nor heartbroken, not anguished nor stricken, not unsure of how you will go on nor distressed, and neither grieved nor aggrieved nor yet maddened with grief. Perhaps your feelings of sadness are to be expressed quietly and without intruding.
- apeescape 2y agoI'm sure there's a sensible middleground between never using big words vs. using them only to add complexity.
- strken 2y agoThat's absolutely true. I would like them used in an intentional way, though. If you just slap them down anywhere then you end up with a sentence like "Obscurantist verbiage is a calling card of the intellectual qua gatekeeper, in that necessary role serving to further the creeping and not unimpenetrable calcification of human linguistic torture" and anyone who has to read your writing will wish you were dead, which is bad, or copy you, which is worse.
- dukeyukey 2y agoBig words are like specialist power tools - they have their place, and if you know how to use them, add a massive amount of value. But if you don't, or if you can reasonably use simpler words, don't use the big ones.