Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
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By JAMES J. KILPATRICK
Universal Press Syndicate
Last summer a music critic at Time magazine began a review in this fashion: “A little mushy, a little square, a little cataclysmic. That whs the response to Wilson Phillips’ eponymous debut album in 1990...”
Today we’re going to talk about “hard words,” the words that columnist Westbrook Pegler once called “out-of-town words.” Every writer has met them, and every good writer has succumbed to their enchantment. Time’s critic met “eponymous” at a party and fell headlong is love. Greek words have a way of doing that to us. -•To set your mind at ease, let me tell you that “eponymous” means “of, relating to, or being the person for whom something is or is believed to be named.” Gen. Zebulon Pike was the eponym for Pike’s Peak. The Sioux tribe gave its name eponynjously to Sioux Falls. Wistaria is an eponymous vine. All clear?
Today’s question is, Was “eponymous” beyond the ken of many or most of Time’s readers? As an editor, how would you call it? Leave it in? Recast the sentence? This is the kind of judgment call that editors must constantly make. ""Let me recur to a point I have often emphasized. Writers must know, or at least try valiantly to know, the vocabularies of their readers. Othenvise the act of prose composition becomes an exercise in futility. This is emphatically not to say that we should write so that every potential reader will understand eVery ^Jard. But unless most 6f our readers understand most of our words, we are not going to hold most of our readers very long. Z Writing for a news magazine involves one level of comprehension. I’ve never written a novel, so I wouldn’t know from experience, but novelists probably envision a differ
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