These are words and phrases I suspect and avoid:
ailing)
try)
have)
be)
person)
problems)
find)
place)
grow)
remove)
appointor
make)
make)
to make this a realityfor
do this)
is, as in
represents a significant problem)
fire)
predict)
plan, as in
slated for Tuesday)
serve, as in
slap them with a fine)
place)
experience)
will)
use)
This has just been linked from Grow-a-Brain, one of my favorite blogs. When I saw it there I wondered whether I should have said why I suspect and avoid the words or whether it was better (funnier? cooler? weirder?) to leave it be. I’m still not sure, but here’s my schtick:
Many of these words have legitimate archaic or rare senses: lovers used to woo, miners still stake claims, and so on. It’s the accustomed modern uses that bother me – I think they’re written so often, for such vague ideas, and with such disregard for the images they used to carry that they’re like used-up chewing gum. Headline editors and PR copywriters should take most of the blame: they collected some punchy short words that seemed sophisticated once and then they forgot to check back in twenty years. I guess they learned extreme
.
You write well by saying exactly what you mean. Using a phrase you don’t understand won’t work, and I’m not sure I understand any of the words on the list. What does rioters clash with police
mean? Can that mean one guy yelling at one officer? Can it mean a hundred deliberately inflicted critical injuries? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does. The word is a hint, not a concept. It could only work in a headline, not in prose and never in speech. (Yeah, did you hear there was a clash downtown yesterday?
) When I see any of these hint-words in prose, I worry that the writer got them, and their facts and ideas, from a headline instead of from first- or detailed second-hand experience.
Read Chaucer, M. F. K. Fisher, Ezra Pound, or Annie Dillard. Watch a play by David Mamet or Shakespeare. Read dispatches by George Orwell or Hemingway. Drop your own names here. These people understood what they were inventing and reporting – or they didn’t try to hide that they didn’t. They found the words that meant exactly what they meant.
From George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language:
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus:
- What am I trying to say?
- What words will express it?
- What image or idiom will make it clearer?
- Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
And he will probably ask himself two more:
- Could I put it more shortly?
- Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
It’s hypocritical and dated (and a bit nuts), but it’s a great essay. If you’ve read it, The Elements of Style, and Fowler, but you still want something to beat your prose with, try The Reader Over Your Shoulder. It could not be more meticulous without being pedantic.
Happy avoiding certain words!
— Vruba.