Whoo-boy. That was like a one-two combination from George Foreman. No, that’s wrong. It was like someone giving you a big warm kiss, then knifing you in the back. With a knife they kept in the deep freeze. I’m talking about the weather, of course. After yesterday’s (relatively) tropical temperatures, we woke this morning to plunging mercury and a carborundum-honed wind. The wind chill temperature tonight is predicted to be about 30 below. And tomorrow will be colder than today.
I tell you this because I know you care. Because I want you marvel at my sheer, primal will to survive. Because I want someone to persuade me to move south!
No, not really. I tried living in Florida. I missed the titanic struggle, the clash of man against nature. Also I missed spring.
Today’s subject: long words. If you read an older book in English, and then read a contemporary book, one of the differences you’ll note is that the older book will have used a lot more big words. Since the time of Hemingway, big words have gone out of fashion in the Anglosphere. There are good reasons for this change, since most every writer has discovered that cutting out the big words and going for simple ones adds considerable punch to prose. Whenever I give advice on writing, one of the first things I suggest is replacing long words (which usually come from Latin by way of French) with short words (which tend to be Anglo-Saxon ones). Write “door” instead of “portal.” Write “cat” instead of “feline.”
This is odd in a way, because Anglo-Saxon was a Germanic language, and German is notorious for its long words. In a bizarre twist, it was the infusion of French/Latin that permitted us to avoid the famous German monstrosities that read like “gerfundenlieberanbrachtsblechtzheitzgrund.” (That’s not a real word, just in case you were wondering.)
I talked about this with a friend in the Viking Age Society a while back. He used to work as a machinist, and at one point his company had to install a piece of equipment made in Germany. The installation manual was in German. My friend isn’t fluent in the language, but he knew a little, so got stuck with the job of figuring out how to put the thing together. He found one item missing, and had to order it. It was a special kind of cotter pin. He told me what the thing was called in German, and it was a ridiculously long name for a very small piece of steel. “But,” he said, “that name was incredibly precise. It described exactly what the pin was for. In English, we just say, ‘cotter pin,’ and that doesn’t really tell us anything.”
It was his opinion that this extreme precision of vocabulary is one of the reasons Germans do so well in the world of engineering. Our English language, compared to German, is sloppy and inefficient.
On top of that, our really technical words are generally borrowings from Latin or Greek. This worked well when it was assumed that all educated English-speakers knew Latin and Greek, but that’s no longer the case. When a German looks at one of his millipede words, he can break it down into its constituents and figure out what it means. When we English-speakers look at our long words, we generally go away as ignorant as when we started.
What’s to be done? Shall we surrender our English-speaking primacy in the world to the greater efficiency of Germans and others?
No, I say. I say we must institute a program of English compounding. From now on, instead of saying, “philanthropic,” we should start saying “humankindlovingandgenerous.” Instead of “polygamous,” we should say, “marryinglotsofpeople.” Instead of “progressive,” we could say, “happytospendotherpeople’smoney.”
I share these ideas at no cost, because I care about making a better world for all of us. Because I’m humankindlovingandgenerous.