Imagine, if you will, typing the minutes for a work meeting and then, days later, finding it returned with a red pen circle around the word "brevity" on page 4, with a comment "Use simple English".
Is "brevity" not simple enough?
What's complex about a word like brevity? I mean, it's not like I used a word like "floccinaucinihilipilification" that puts the reader at risk of exploding their sinuses simply trying to pronounce it! No, I don't claim to know what floccinaucinihilipilification means (yet), or how to pronounce it without doing myself an injury in the process (it's "flok-suh-naw-suh-nahy-hil-uh-pil-uh-fi-KAY-shun" in case you're curious) - but at least I will look it up later. Which is kinda the point, innit?
The point - that even if people don't recognize the word, it's not like they don't have a computer in their pocket they could use to look it up? Like they don't have the entirety of human knowledge available at their finger tips, if they're only willing to bother to access it?
And then, to add insult to injury, a colleague, who is the usual go-to for English grammar and spelling in correspondence (and has been for 30 years) chimes in to say she also doesn't know the word... and adds skeptically that she doesn't believe it's even real - causing my lower jaw to almost literally hit the floor!
Of course, now that I've edited that document as instructed, to replace "brevity" - ironically, with an eight word long sentence - future readers of that document will have been deprived of an opportunity to learn a new word, and there's a good possibility they will remain as ignorant as they they were before. I feel that this has done them a disservice.
The lesson in all this? Is there one? I suppose that depends on your point of view. I've no doubt that someone in management looking down might view using "complex" words - or words more complex than "see Dick run" - as pretentious. That kind of thinking is a trap, because it keeps people locked into a voluntarily closed off, self-imposed box filled with ignorance and, if you will, ignorants.
For me, at least, the lesson is that I might not be the most intellectual person on the planet, I might not even have a very high IQ (I used to consider myself as "average" back in high school), but that doesn't mean that being well-read and curious about things you don't know or understand - and bothering to find out for yourself - won't make you better informed and more knowledgeable than many, if not all those around you. It also provides a telling clue as to why the world is such a mess in our time - the more educated people who were in charge are now retired or dead - and those who've replaced them are far too eager to dumb things down for the sake of saving time and energy and to preserve the comfort of the stupid, lazy and ignorant, rather than to encourage people to learn and improve themselves, to make the world better - or even to keep it in the sorry state it is rather than deteriorating further (that means "getting even worse").
I could go on a tangent about how intelligence breeds more intelligence, and stupidity breeds laziness and even worse stupidity, but - for the sake of brevity - I will end my lament with the observation that it's no wonder so many adults today actually think that chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
And, just in case you're wondering, I did look up "floccinaucinihilipilification" - although I still won't attempt to pronounce it because I like my innards where they are, thank you very much. It means "the act or habit of estimating or describing something as worthless, or making something to be worthless." Make of that what you will.
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