Big Words Hurt

One of my core missions here on this blog is to help enlighten the world by assisting with your edumacation. Not only does this include carefull prooofreading and snarky elitism, but fully high-brow content and, yes, big words. Whenever I stumble across one of those 20¢ words in my reading time, I harken back to a vivid memory from an elderly professor of mine with rather pointed features, who exhorted me just to get on with it. He would croak semi-intelligible phrases like "time waits for no man" or "I have baloney in my slacks". Of course, truer words have never been uttered.

So, given all of this back-story, I still tend to cut across the grain. Both in my office at work and my library at home, I keep a thick book chock full of them-there words called a dictionary. When in the course of my reading I come across big, bloated, greedy-for-letters words, I immediately look them up online to find out what the heck is going on. If I kept all this learned-goodness to myself, I would feel selfish, which could lead to pride. So, over the past few weeks, I have kept track of several words that popped up so that I could pass on what I have learned.

Needlessly Big Word	Synonym
peripatetic	mobile
atavistic	crude
grandiloquent	flowery
adventitious	foreign
inchoate	shapeless
languorous	lazy
parsimonious	cheap
depredations	thefts
propinquity	closeness
peccadilloes	offenses
sophistry	trickery
assiduously	intently
dimidiation	halves

You will notice that in the above table, I list the "big word", but also an equally acceptable synonym (also known as a homophone). Why the authors didn't just use a simple, approachable, man-about-town word, makes clear that they got paid by how much ink they gobbled up.