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by Carl Muller

You want to explain something to a child - short words are easiest and best. Long words only pass over its head; the child will not understand half you say. They only blur your explanation. Just try to express yourself in long words - "of learned length and thundering sound" as was the stamp of the village schoolmaster - and your listeners get the feeling that there is more sham than thought.

Long words put us into ruts. We lose force and sting and become dreary. Short words don't allow us to hide or dodge issues. They say what they mean - no obtuse hints. They are sharp, clear, and wholly understood.

Look at it this way: At the birth of the world, humans may have communicated in growls and grunts. They had to hunt, fight, get mates and find a cave to live in. The women had their own missions - the child to look after, the pot on the fire, skins to make clothes with. They used short, sharp sounds to express joy, pain, rage, fear, even doubt.

Later these sounds became short, strong and clear words, bred in the flesh and bone and becoming, down the ages, the very life-blood of speech.

A boy can tell a girl: "I love you. Kiss me!"

An athlete can exclaim" "I have won!"

A fan can shout: "Well done! Good for you!"

A man can cry in fear: "Fire! Get out quick!"

A mother can ask her son: "Why did you do this?"

A husband could moan: "My wife has left me."

A patient can tell the nurse: "I feel bad."

An angry man can snarl: "I hate you!" and if angrier can well shout: "I'll kill you!"

As we well know, a lot of the stuff we call "bad words" are short. Curses and oaths are made up of short words - "damn" and "hell" and even "oh shit!" and even worse, are so full of force.

Short words are also used in the vilest sense - sex words, the raw, stark facts of life - but no one can ever call them pale or weak words that hide the truth. They don't paint over the dirt and hide low thoughts. Long words that are used to disguise or camouflage are sly tricks of speech. At least, with short words you can say what you mean.

I think such words surface from heart or gut, if not from the brain. These snappy words deal with things that make us act.

They come out like thinking out loud, and when they fall from our lips, they make our thoughts true and alive.

Of course, long words have their uses, but I think much of them were originally formed by taking short root words and joining them, then changing the effect a bit, then putting on heads, adding ends and rolling them out to fit a particular mood.

Old wise men must have felt the urge to reach out to a world of pure thought and these vague things in their minds needed impressive words.

It is in this way that long words crept into language, by way of old monastic scribes and the monks. Of course, some will say that these long words have grace and rhythm, but there's hardly any horse-sense, is there?

But it had to happen, sadly enough. Snobs, and the vain and uppity used long words. To them, it was a kind of class. They were not dolts like the common short-word herd. Even if the dolts knew that black was black and white, white. It became a matter of pride to use long words.

It was a way of looking down on the rest, pretending to be superior, even high-born, living proud lives and dropping their speech-pearls before swine. Shakespeare was tied to a whipping post because he wished to kill a deer.

To Lord Lucy, poor men must not kill his deer. His serfs only knew of live deer. For the lord who held the land there was a better word for the dead deer that the poor man may not eat. Some writers and academics think their long words give them style. They keep using their own brands of hyphenated gibberish and shun the bluff old plain talk that is so brisk and full of strength. Long words take the roundabout route.

You can peregrinate in the metropolis or walk in the city. The former is like meat without salt. And how would you feel, sitting at some seminar or another and listening to and old bore whose spectacles keep slipping down his nose as he reads from a paper he has prepared and reads like this:

"The intrinsicality of the former opposes the diathesis of the latter. Quiddity counters schesis and this is the contradistinction of the formal and modal existence. Such multifariousness and incommeasurability emphasizes irrelativity an the divarication is obvious. We have disproportionateness an irreconcilableness.

In attempting to regularize such involution that is both immethodical and involuted, I have collocated and methodized, but the corrugation persists. First, a contesseration was necessary. The spargefaction had to be acervated and the indefeasible achieved. This gives prepollence and cogency and also routs impuissance and inefficaciousness."

He looks up, pushes back his spectacles and beams, waiting for his listeners to clap madly. Of course he is well applauded. In twenty minutes he has stuffed the ears of his audience with enough baloney that it will take a month of digging it all out with a kan-henda. And tell me, if you can, what DID he say?

At the main table, he will resume his seat, and he shaken by the hand and receive approving nods from a bunch of academic ruins who will in turn rise to spew more of the same - words that to them are so necessary to their standing.

The ordinary man will stare, his eyes will glaze over and he will hiss to the man in the next seat: "What diddy say? What DID he say?"

His companion will roll his eyes. "God only knows."

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