Rare, Lovely Words Wasted If No One Will Understand

A few weeks ago, before Bob Dole got kinder and gentler, a columnist wrote about the candidate's dark side. On NBC's "Today" show, he said, "we saw a splenetically combative man."

A what kind of man? A splenetic man. The word comes out of "spleen," an organ situated somewhere south by southeast of the stomach. At one time the best medical opinion held that the spleen was the seat of our passions, and because most passions involve anger, the spleen came to be identified with ill humor, malice and general peevishness.

Question: What good purpose was served by throwing "splenetically" at an audience of newspaper readers? That is a rhetorical question, as Jack Kemp said at the Republican convention, and you don't have to answer it. So I will answer it for you.

"Splenetically" served no good purpose at all. It gratified the writer's ego, but that's no proper purpose of the writing art. At least it is no proper purpose of the writer whose aim is to communicate. Do we want to be admired or do we want to be understood?

That's another rhetorical question. Answer it as you will.

Novelist Lawrence Sanders, in "The Eighth Commandment," spoke of a character in search of "a splanchnic reaction." Everybody grasp that one? In context, "splanchnic" meant "spontaneous" or "instinctive" or "unprepared" or even "gut." Does Mr. Sanders have any estimate of how many of his readers have a handle on "splanchnic"? Or should a novelist care?

In The Wall Street Journal in February, we learned that changes in communications law could end "60 years of sclerotic federal and state regulation." Was "sclerotic" clearer than rigid, unbending, detailed, minute, strict or inflexible?

Anthony Lane is one of the brightest stars in The New Yorker's galaxy of writers. A couple of months ago he turned out a sparkling piece on Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond tales of espionage. In the 1930s, Fleming "devoted himself to the pursuit of loucheness." That was a new pursuit on me. To be louche is to be disreputable or shady. Fleming had louche morals. All clear?

Last year, a feature writer for Knight-Ridder interviewed the organizer of a "Plain English" conference. Liverpool-born Chrissie Maher "has conquered the British Isles, flaying phumphering politicians." Whence this verb, to phumpher? Is such a politician phumpered up? Does she phumpher a lectern?

None of my dictionaries ever met "phumpering," and more's the pity, for it seems a lovely word if only we knew what it means. Are we speaking of a blowhard, a windbag or a bore? It seems likely, in context, that a phumphering politician is a politician who uses too many unfamiliar words. He is not audience phriendly.

In June, Time magazine reported a proposal to exhume Beethoven so that a lock of his hair could be put to DNA analysis. A reader objected that if the analysis indicated that the composer had engaged in loucheness, it would be of great moment "to the quidnunc." A quidnunc is a busybody, a gossip, a spreader of slanderous tales. Supermarket tabloids are the work of quidnuncs. Don't be a quidnunc.

Last year I heard from a reader in Aiken, S.C., Don L. Passage Jr., who had run afoul of "The Last Ship" by William Brinkley. An otherwise good yarn, he wrote, was shipwrecked on reefs of difficult words. He listed a few: mansuetude, mensural, deliquescent, flocculant, virescent, caesura, mauveine, lenitive, peripeteia, fulgent, heirophant and spondaic.

Novelist Brinkley, said reader Passage, was writing "not for his readers but for himself." Bull's-eye!

Now, lest I sound overly splenetic about "hard words," let me acknowledge that many readers disagree with my chronic howls and lamentations. A respectable school of thought holds that a writer has a positive duty to educate his readers, to expand their vocabularies and to compel them to exercise their intellectual muscles. If readers often stumble, so what? Let them get up, suppress their annoyance and stop whining. We'll learn 'em.

My objection is not to hard words as such. My protest goes to the employment of words that are inappropriate for a writer's assumed readership. Writers and editors must constantly guess at these things. Sometimes we hit, sometimes we miss.

As a cub reporter 55 years ago, I wrote my share of rhinestone prose. Once I wrote of a gentleman who died of cardiac malfunction. My city editor summoned me to his desk. "Son," he said to me, "in the Richmond News Leader he died of heart disease." (Copyright 1996, Universal Press Syndicate)