PERSPICACIOUS AND POLYSYLLABIC Wall Street Journal columnist Elizabeth Bernstein pleads guilty to loving big words and is “worried that big words — the challenging expressive and interesting ones — might start going away.” And she wonders: “Can people who enjoy using big and obscure words and those who are annoyed by them get through to each other?”
Ms. Bernstein claims that “technology is largely to blame for big words’ fade out.” But that assertion may be causing some readers to wonder whether the real reason behind this column’s frequent critique of galloping technological advances is the threat they pose not to society but to the opportunity for free and unrestricted indulgence in polysyllabic excess. Might my ongoing efforts to detail the manifold societal casualties of the digital age be a mere front a pose on my part?
Perish the thought. After all Bernstein’s assertion that technology will be the undoing of polysyllabic usage is based on the fact that “we are being conditioned to communicate faster and in shorter bursts. There isn’t room for big words in a text or a tweet or even a quickly dashed-off e-mail.…(“R u with me?”).”
But I’m not affected by any of this at all. I don’t tweet nor do I have the foggiest notion of how to do so (although I am jealous of a family friend’s talent for doing a mean birdcall). As for texts and e-mails I’ve written here previously of my determination to treat those modes of communication with the very same attention to proper literary conventions that I would give to writing a letter or essay. And so I’m not concerned in the least about technology’s effects on my word usage; all that’s left for me to worry about is the small matter of what it’s doing to undermine the foundations of human society as we know it.
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