We discussed this post—and the storm it caused—in my poetry seminar, and I have been thinking about it ever since.
Language is not decoration laid over thought. It is the matter from which thoughts are made. It gives thought shape, precision, and a life beyond the person thinking it.
When I choose to say that a candle guttered rather than flickered, I am not replacing an easy word with a difficult one for the pleasure of making someone open a dictionary. A flickering flame wavers. A guttering flame struggles, threatening to go out. Change the word and you change what is happening in the room.
That does not mean difficulty is automatically a virtue. A writer can be imprecise in six syllables as easily as in one. Obscurity is not profundity. The question should not be, “Will every reader already know this word?” It should be, “Is this the right word?”
Readers are free not to enjoy difficult prose, just as writers are free to choose the register in which they write. But asking every text to be frictionless is not the same thing as asking it to be accessible. It is asking language never to demand anything of us, and in turn never teach us or reveal anything to us.
If books may contain only words we already know, reading cannot enlarge our vocabulary. If our vocabulary never enlarges, neither does our ability to understand and communicate ideas. Looking up an unfamiliar word is not evidence that the writer has failed. Sometimes it is evidence that reading is doing part of its work.
This matters because language is how private thought becomes public argument. An idea cannot become law, doctrine, discovery, or common cause until it has been given a form that other minds can receive.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”
That was not a description of the world in 1776. It was, in point of fact … a fiction. It was not a principle its author lived by. Yet the sentence made a claim large enough for later generations to seize and turn against the exclusions of the men who wrote it.
Alexis De Toqueville noted in Democracy in America that nearly everyone could read, that reading materials were almost universally available, and even farmers and tradesman spoke with an intellectual clarity common only among the most educated classes in Europe.
No, encountering scrying in a fanfiction is not the Declaration of Independence. But deep literacy does not descend from the heavens. We cultivate it in smaller encounters: reading a poem twice, following an unfamiliar allusion, looking up a word because the world on the page matters enough to us.
A functioning society depends upon people who can understand difficult language, distinguish one meaning from another, and recognize when words are being used to enlighten, persuade, conceal, or deceive. That capacity is not innate. We acquire it by reading beyond the boundaries of what we already know.
Use the easy word when it is the exact word. Use the difficult word when it is the exact word. But do not ask writers to make the world smaller simply because learning its name takes five seconds.
Words matter. Also, there is no word that means scrying that is not “scrying”. Le sigh…
2087
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