zlacker

>>cosmoj+(OP)
I couldn't disagree more with this piece, especially the idea of a "draft #4" where you go through what you've written and replace all "pedestrian" words with less common ones from the dictionary. I know these writers, and how they "write" - it's painful to read and oozes pretentiousness. You can always tell when someone tries to fake having a wider vocabulary.

>>suctio+l9
> I know these writers, and how they "write" - it's painful to read and oozes pretentiousness.

Are you thinking, perhaps, of Mark Twain? I've never heard anyone say he was "painful to read" or "oozes pretentiousness"; you could be the first. Yet it was Twain who wrote, "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning," which is what this "draft #4" business is all about. (He stole the phrasing from a friend of his, but the sentiment was his own, in a letter in 01888 to George Bainton: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/09/02/lightning/)

>>kragen+7e
Yes, but no doubt you're aware of Twain's companion piece to that quote: “Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”

>>cookie+2g
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].