On brobdingnagian vocabulary

This is a small word. That is also a small word. In fact, all the words in this post so far are small, which makes them easy to read. But ease of reading isn't everything.

Is everything a big word? Ten letters! Three or four syllables, depending on how carefully you enunciate! But readers allergic to multisyllabic words can't enunciate, can they? They can only speak.

The day is coming when I won't be able to speak to my students at all, thanks to the Big Word Problem. Just about every semester on course evaluations some anonymous student complains that I use too many big words. "She uses big words alot," they write, or "She uses alot of big words." I generally read these comments while sitting on my hands so I can't spontaneously insert a big red virgule between a and lot. And if I mentioned this in class, I would have to explain not only what a virgule is but why people who want to give advice about vocabulary would be taken more seriously if they wrote a lot as a two-word phrase. 

So the Big Word Problem crops up every semester, but this week it suddenly got bigger when a student complained that when I grade papers, I seem to care more about big words than about content.

How does this complaint rankle? Let me count the ways:

1. Nothing on my grading rubric refers to big words. The rubric asks whether the paper employs diction appropriate to the audience and purpose, which seems like a reasonable expectation. The size of the words matters less than how well they suit the particular writing task.


2. This is college, where little words go to grow up. Anyone who prefers to write paragraphs composed entirely of familiar single-syllable words ought to go back to second grade. 

3. This complaint arose in a literature class in which I am trying to equip students to use specific analytical terms so that I don't have to keep encountering relatable. Some of those analytical terms aren't even all that big--prose or rhythm, for instance--but you wouldn't believe the grief I endured when I expected students to learn the word stasis.

4. When grading an essay, I don't know how to separate the content from the words. The words are the content. We're not finger-painting, drawing graphs, or sending messages via semaphore; all we have to work with are the words, so we ought to use the best words possible for the task. Sometimes the best words are big.

In our family we reserve the big word brobdingnagian to describe the cutlery at a certain chain steakhouse. When the server plops down in front of you a steak the size of a hubcap, you don't want to attack it with a nail file and oyster fork--a pitchfork, maybe, but not an oyster fork. Fortunately, the restaurant provides a knife and fork sturdy enough to carve a haunch of venison. It's positively brobdingnagian.

There I go using big words again. If I want to communicate this lesson to my students, I'll have to simplify: Use the right word for the task. If you don't know the right word, learn some new words. They won't bite--they're just words. And no matter how big they are, remember: you're bigger.