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