Language was not given to the ordinary writer to enable him to conceal his thoughts. The best stylist, after all, is the one who expresses what he has to say in such direct, well-chosen words that the one who reads thinks not of the style at all, but gets the thought of the writer easily, without considering the medium.
As a rule, short words are better than long words to express a writer's thoughts. Compare Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address, for instance, with one of the Johnsonian promulgations of the honorable Grover Cleveland. The Gettysburg address, a model of pith and brevity that every American citizen should know by heart, is made up almost wholly of short, simple, common, Saxon words. Ex-President Cleveland's written utterances are big with poly-syllables, Latin derivatives, with an "-ation" at least in every other line. Lincoln's address will live when Cleveland's name has almost been forgotten.
The tendency of scientific men to use long words has always been particularly noticeable. In an article in an English magazine some time ago, T. A. Vance gave some amusing examples of scientific verbosity. Herbert Spencer, in his "First Principles," the first volume of his Synthetic Philosophy, says that "Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indifferent, incoherent, homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation." The late George John Romanes in his "Examination of Weismannism," in speaking of plant life, says: "All the multicellular organisms propagate themselves not exclusively by fission or gemmation, but by sexual fertilization." This, Mr. Vance says, translated, into common English, means that the higher plants multiply not only by division and buds, but by seeds. A little further on, Mr. Romanes speaks of the "undifferentiated idioplasm of the first ontogenetic stage." "Such words are simply staggering," Mr. Vance goes on. "The other day I met with the word 'idiodactylae.' The Standard Dictionary defines it thus: 'A phalanx of coliomorpic oscine birds.' Of course, the meaning of the word is at once made clear. In reading on entomological subjects I met with the word 'planipennia,' which the Standard says is a name given to 'a sub-order of neuropterous insects with multinervate wings and multiarticulate antenna.' The definitions of scientific words in the Standard Dictionary, as may be inferred by the examples cited, are not characterized by extreme simplicity of language. The reader is informed that the 'acanthocephala' is the name given to an order of 'nematelminth worms, without a mouth or intestinal canal, but with a retractile proboscis covered with hooks, comprising echinorhynchidae.' The 'arcturidae' are a 'family of isopods, with inferior operculiform uropods, and with the anterior (four) pairs of legs ciliated, and the posterior (three) ambulatory.' Taking up the study of shellfish, one finds that the 'rhopalodinida;' are a 'family of diplostomidean holothurians, having a flask-shaped body.' Most people know at least what a flask is like."
Professor Hyatt, in an article on the nautilus in the American Naturalist, tells us that "the leading characteristic of parallelism in all genetic series of nautiloids is a tendency towards closer coiling and greater involution in the more specialized forms of each separate series, and a correlative increase in the profundity of the impressed zohe."
Professor Cope, in his "Primary Factors of Organic Evolution," tells his reader that "in the first case, that of the human elbow, the cubitus was luxated posteriorly, so that the humeral condyles articulate with the ulna, anterior to the coronoid process." The translator of Ribot's "Psychology of Attention" tries to say that when we are happy we forget our surroundings. He puts it in this way: "Intense enjoyment produces a momentary unity of consciousness." "Time was," concludes Mr. Vance, "when a word to the wise was sufficient. Nowadays, it must be a mighty long word or it will not do. Time was when the schoolboy could recite with satisfaction both to himself and the teacher:—
Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean,
And the pleasant land.
"Nowadays, to meet the full requirements of polysyllabic science, he must paraphrase it thus:—
Infinitesimal particles of saline humective fluidity,
Minute corpuscles of non-adhering inorganic matter,
Conjointly cause to exist the unmeasurable expanse of aqueous section,
And the resplendent superficial area of dry solidity."
Science certainly has produced some memorable verbal monstrosities. "Nitrophenylenediamine" (twenty-one letters ) is the chemical name of a red dye-stuff, and " Methylbenzoinethoxyethyltetrahydropyridinecarboxylate " (fifty-three letters) is chemical English for cocaine. Surgery contributes to the list of long scientific words the lovely compound "dynamorphosteopalinklaster (twenty-six letters) — the name of an instrument for breaking a falsely-united fracture. Compared with these scienific marvels "incomprehensibleness" and "incomprehensibility" seem plain, and short, and simple.
Space writers, who are paid by the line, can make more money, of course, if the editor will allow them to use long words where short ones would be more effective. Such writers may be interested to know that the longest word in the English language is "disestablishmentarianism," which was coined by William E. Gladstone. It contains twenty-four letters. The longest word which has yet appeared in the Oxford Dictionary is "incircumscriptibleness" (twenty-two letters), which is in the part just issued. The famous Ekklesiazousai compound of Aristophanes — " Lepadotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimupotrimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakeclummenokichlepikossuphophattoperisteralektruonoptegkephalokigklopeleioligoosiraiobaletraganopterugon" — with its 169 Greek letters and its seventy-eight syllables, is undoubtedly the longest word extant. Like Shakespeare's "honorificabilitudinitatibus," it is not available for frequent use by space writers. A more useful word to the penny-a-liner is "disproportionableness" (twenty-one letters), which has long had the reputation of being the longest honest word in the English language. Editors as a rule, however, do not take kindly to writers with a polysyllabic style. They incline rather to writers whose style is terse and simple, like that of the author of the commercial distich which Thomas Bailey Aldrich has immortalized as "the perfection of pith and poetry":—
"Root Beer
Sold Here."
Boston, Mass. Arthur Fosdick.
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