There's a great line in Patricia Lockwood's recent DFW essay where she says "He makes people feel they are in real possession of the word ‘volute’, that their vast untapped icebergs of vocabulary and perceptual detritus are readily available to them."
The point is to use the words that your readers will understand and that express your ideas the clearest. If you assume that your readers are somewhat similar to yourself (often reasonable), then you having to look up words means that your readers likely will have to as well.
Good writing is about expressing and transferring ideas. It is not supposed to be intellectual masturbation, though some may treat it as such.
> Good writing is about expressing and transferring ideas.
Not everything is a scientific paper. Good writing can also be art. There's a reason why Shakespeare wrote his 18th sonnet and not just "I think you're very beautiful".
Shakespeare had an exceptionally large vocabulary. He constantly used words his audience / readers didn't understand. And that's okay with you, because he was "expressing and transferring ideas". Except that it's not okay with you, because he didn't "use the words that [his] readers will understand and that express [his] ideas the clearest".
The idea a non-fiction text such as a scientific paper wants to express is (mainly) empirical.
The idea a fiction text such as Shakespeare's works wants to express is (mainly) emotional.
The exact meaning of words is more important in the former case than the latter, though not unimportant in the latter.
Shakespeare is one of the biggest outliers when it comes to reach as a function of complexity of language, and I don't think that generalizing from that specific anecdote is useful, especially as pertains to modern writers. I wouldn't advise any new writers to imitate Shakespeare if they want to be published today.
> I wouldn't advise any new writers to imitate Shakespeare if they want to be published today.
It's very easy to get published today, I just got published and so did you.
But sure, your advice is probably good if you are concerned mainly with commercial success. I would venture to guess, though, that most great, enduring writing comes from something inside the writer that they feel they have to express, rather than from looking outside themselves for the right "product-market fit." Some writers find a simple, lapidary style, others prefer more ornate language. Both can be great and I don't think we should call one right and one wrong.
I think the quote is emphasizing that writing isn't about meticulously picking out words, but first and foremost about telling an interesting story. Editing, rewriting, looking up words can be done later.
Words don't fall out of use by accident, I'd say most words get the level of usage that they rightfully deserve. Every word on that list has a more widely understood alternative that people commonly use instead. The primary purpose of language is facilitate communication, and using words that most people don't understand works against that goal. Alternatively you're free to use language in service of your own curiosity of obscure words, or perhaps just to showcase your own superior vocabulary to other people. But don't be surprised if that makes you a less effective communicator.
Of course they do. Unless you're suggesting that there's some kind of deep state conspiracy to alter the English language one word at a time.
>and using words that most people don't understand works against that goal
Most people don't speak much English at all. Should everyone stop using all but the most common thousand words? Most native speakers aren't experts in any particular field. Should all technical writing spend dozens of words to imprecisely replace each bit of specific jargon? Should no one ever coin a new term simply because it won't already be in wide use?
> Unless you're suggesting that there's some kind of deep state conspiracy to alter the English language one word at a time.
Not at all. There’s an entirely democratic process used to decide which words are commonly used an understood, everybody simply chooses for themselves what words are useful for them to include in their vocabulary.
> Most people don't speak much English at all.
I wasn’t specifically talking about English. My comments would apply to any non-dead language.
Regarding the rest of your comment, people modify languages all the time. They invent new words or bring old ones into use (or stop using old ones), and whether they survive depends entirely upon how popular they are within the culture. This isn’t specific to the broader English speaking culture either, subcultures have their own vocabularies whether they are technical subcultures, or some music subculture, or zoomer meme culture… they all invent vocabularies to suit their communication needs.
A better title for this page would be “a list of (mostly) discarded words that I (we?) like”. In regards to how effective these words are at facilitating communication, I see no argument presented here for why they get less recognition or use than they deserve. Because most English speakers wouldn’t understand most of these words, and using a word that somebody doesn’t understand is always going to be a less effective way of communicating with them than using a word that they do (and all of the words I saw on that list have actually widely understood alternatives).
Just the other day I introduced an non-native English speaking friend to the word myopic. You'd think "short-sighted" would win out as the clearer term, but myopic consistently beats it on Google Trends. I would expect a writer to alternate between them if they needed to repeat the concept and wanted to clearscribe.
>If I have to look a word up in a dictionary that is often the fault of the writer, too.
And when should I freeze my vocabulary and declare that all the words I haven't yet memorized are worthless? At the age of seven? Perhaps twelve?