In Defense of Big Words

I LIKE big words. Words were put on this earth to help us communicate effectively. They allow us to make pictures in our heads which carry meaning and feelings. Words help us grasp concepts which might otherwise get obfuscated by misunderstanding.

Too many people nowadays are starting to lose the capacity to communicate effectively. They are lost in a maze of one-letter words they text from a hand-held device. Those words generally convey very little. We are the generation of the Twitter and the text. Gone is the poetry and the sense of wonder; gone the pithy description. Gone too, is our memory.

Sad, that. We lose the capacity to see a vision in our mind's eye simply from reading the written word. Now it must be spelled out for us in a 3-D movie. Now our children entertain themselves for hours shooting little figures with big cartoon guns instead of romping in the fields of the written word. Our husbands can hardly write sentiments in our birthday cards. Thank goodness for Hallmark.

Bring me words such as pyroclastic, insensate, ambulatory, lapsus, proprioception, and glaucous. Shower me with extravagant fireworks of episememes and dispersoids and primogenitors. Confront me with gyrofrequencies and attenuators. I want to be indefatigable in the quest for knowledge and a champion of those poor, foundering words. I shall endeavor to indemnify those souls I can reach, against the loss of words such as obvolute, laconic, and pallor, rout and spicate, swathe and philately and ineradicable.

Power to the word and words have power, I say.