One thing I have never been is a liker of unnecessarily using Big Words.

For lack of a better term, Big Words is my shorthand for any form of text where there are basically two steps I have to go through:

1. Translate parts of the text that I am either unfamiliar with, or think I know but am going to double check to make sure
2. Actually parse the thing I’m reading

Technically, Big Words can include concepts as well. The difference is between throwing in a particular term where you assume it means anything to the reader versus it being some term that you’re going to introduce and then explain.

In no particular order, some Big Words that I’ve come across recently are Sturm und Drang, Raison d’être and a priori¹ to illustrate what sort of things come to mind.

My preference for not using Big Words is probably due to having grown up in a small town where neither myself or my parents went to university.

There’s also just the small town thing of trying not to show off in order to seem humble but there are some other benefits to trying to state things as plainly as you can:

1. Perhaps most importantly, it allows you to be lazy efficient. I’m able to write this blog post with little to no editing as I go, and in one sitting, because there is pretty much no filter between my brain and what I’m typing. What you read is pretty much exactly what I’m thinking.
2. The more big words you use, the less accessible your writing is to whoever might be reading it. Obviously know your audience but you never know who might read your writing over a long enough timespan. It also leaves the door open for lurkers who might otherwise bounce right off a piece of writing when they get stuck parsing it instead of asking you, or jumping to a search tab.
3. It also leaves the door open for those who speak English as a second language and might otherwise struggle to read what you’re on about
4. There’s a certain sense of pride you can find in being able to write things that are nice to read, and still kinda smart without sounding smart I think². The bell curve meme comes to mind.
5. There’s the idea that if you actually understand something, you can explain it in relatively simple terms. Obviously you can distort a message doing that and I would say that there’s a difference between removing unnecessary Big Words versus having them for the sake of wanting to sound smart.

While writing this, I discovered there is actually a website called bigwords.com that contains a big words list.

Some entries, like Abracadabra, are just silly being on that list and are clearly not big words. Others, like Magniloquent, are very much big words and I don’t actually think I have ever heard anyone say that word, let alone write it before now.

I don’t actually think I’m onto anything novel here, and once again I am mostly just writing some junk so I don’t get fined by Beeminder, but it is something I think about a fair bit.

As LLMs trend more and more professional sounding, I do think the whole “Being able to write in the same tone as you speak” angle becomes a pretty important way to seem normal in the ocean of em-dash-slop floating around.

If everyone can use Big Words easily, are they even Big Words anymore? Maybe we’ll all just have machines translate from Big Words to Normal Words on the fly and pretend we all understand Big Words.