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Unless we are Writing a diary, we write for one reason only. That purpose is to convey an idea from the writer to the reader. This demands a common language. More to the point, it demands a common vocabulary.
Communication falters when a writer employs words that are not in a reader’s vocabulary. I will venture a guess that not one person in 10,000 knows what is meant by “avatar.” It is one of those words in Dwight MacDonald’s acid comment, that belong in the zoo section of a dictionary. Westbrook Pegler called them outof-town words. They delight the writer buy they mystify the reader. Is this the purpose of writing?
A couple of years ago one of my beloved friends, a gentleman who shall be nameless, wrote a column about women in the military. He said: “The attempt to equalize the sexes is going to be asymptotic.” What he meant, I believe, is that no matter how hard the armed services try to make things equal, the goal is impossible to achieve.
My beloved friend went on to say that all the good aspects of women’s liberation “cannot dissipate that tropism that assigns to the woman primary responsibility for the care of the child.” Tropism? A tropism is “an innate tendency to react to stimuli in a definite manner.” Could the sentence have been phrased more clearly?
Another of my colleagues, who also shall be nameless, wrote a column about David Halberstam’s recent history of the 1950s. My friend said that “Halberstam’s history, though capacious, has a large lacuna.” Readers of this newspaper’s editorial section are quite likely to
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