Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

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Absolutely, and that is often the point of rummaging through the dictionary. On another occasion Twain put it more... eloquently? Here he does ooze pretentiousness:

> In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency... Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity and vaniloquent vapidity.

McPhee's essay Somers was commenting on warns against the same danger:

> In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don't talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words.

So clearly McPhee was not advocating the unnecessary use of hundred-dollar words [correcting for inflation since Twain's time].

I have to mention the elephant in the room - how you, kragen, habitually write e.g. "01888" when "1888" will do — you "choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better".

Y10K proofing. It's a practice of the Long Now Foundation:

https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di...

Regardless of what it's for, writing 5 digit years is the kind of choice that makes your writing "ooze pretentiousness" just like choosing to use hundred dollar words last seen a century ago.

Nah. It's a little conceit. It's a small dash of eccentricity to add spice to an unusual point. It invites one to ask the question, "why do you habitually use 5 digit years?"

You, on the other hand, are veering directly into ad-hom and that's not nice. We can talk about how we like to use language without calling out other peoples' language choices.

I venture to aver, you pusillanimous chop-logic, that upon undertaking to investigate the situation in greater profundity, you would in all likelihood discover that you are taking the entire thing entirely too seriously!

Rule 00005!

Poe's Law in action. Any elaborate parody not clearly marked as such will be taken seriously by someone.

Sure, I have zero doubt that McPhee is a goldmine of good writing advice. I don't know who Somers is and it feels to me like the heart of TFA is basically a hack to make your writing seem more "literary".

Somers, too, implicitly criticizes "using fancy language where fancy language isn’t called for"—"fustian" isn't a compliment when used of prose. The adjectives paired with it in Wiktionary tell the story: "Dutch fustian", "wretched fustian", "mere fustian", "genteel fustian which lacks either poetic resonance or demotic realism".

But he doesn't really give any writing advice in his essay. He doesn't recommend that you write fustian or that you write like Hemingway or indeed that you write at all; instead, he recommends that you read the dictionary because it will be fun. So, if we're talking about writing advice, we need to look at McPhee's essay, not Somers's.

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