Empty Words
A new series where I look at the state of language.
“Brevity is the soul of wit.” - Polonius.
The vocabulary of the average U.S. adult declined between the mid-1970s and the 2010s.1 Though it declined across all levels of education, the steepest drops were for those who had a bachelor’s or graduate degree. How did we get here? And can we get back?
The Hungry Word Hound
In the past year, as I have re-incorporated writing into my life, I’ve had to reach for a thesaurus a hundred times. And this being the 21st century, I reached for internet thesauri first.
But often I would dig through a few before feeling a vague frustration, closing all my tabs, and giving up. Trying to find a synonym to dazzling, the Merriam-Webster online thesaurus would offer luminous, radiant, even fulgent. None of these convey the stupefying effect of something truly dazzling. Which, in this case, I needed to convey something sublime.
When I rediscovered a Roget’s Thesaurus from 2005 in my parent’s house, it was like I had struck word-gold, and my cup overflowed with synonyms, new words, and sharper meanings. After acquiring a copy of J.I. Rodale’s 1961 The Synonym Finder I found even deeper cuts: coruscating, scintillating, bewildering.
The older the thesaurus, the more words I found. This was liberating. It was also disturbing. I felt that my writing was being hamstrung.
Although IQ is increasing, Americans’ vocabularies are decreasing. I wasn’t imaging the thesaurus getting worse. But I wanted to know why.
Literary Minimalism
In the 1940’s, the writing style of William Faulkner and that of Ernest Hemingway became exemplars of clear, diametric opposites. Faulkner was known for long, complex sentence structures and obscure word choices. Conversely, Hemingway’s simple approach to word choice and sentence structure fundamentally revolutionized American writing. Faulkner, and writers like him, were thus cast in the cultural consciousness as vestigial purple-prosers. This literary minimalism, like its contemporary design movement, was modern.
So, the war began: the maximalist writers, in all their verbosity, were obfuscating meaning and confounding readers through long, complex sentences and obscure, large words. The minimalists had a point in paring down sprawling sentences, which readers can easily lose their place within. Short sentences are easier to grasp and can be linked with other sentences to construct greater meaning.
Perhaps that’s why Faulkner once felt the need to comment that Hemingway “Has no courage. He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to a dictionary.” To this, Hemingway retorted, “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
The literary minimalists undoubtedly won the war on style. One needs only to pick up any book of writing advice to hear its echoes: “keep it simple, stupid.” Even those whom we do not think of as minimalist writers have been clearly influenced. Joan Didion, for example, taught herself to write by rewriting Hemingway. Her short, punchy style certainly reflects it. Even a writer like Stephen King places his ethos in Hemingway’s bare-bones approach, passed to an entire generation of writers in On Writing. Though King’s readers may note he breaks his own rules and often.
To the minimalists, there is an air of skepticism about language. This aligns it with other postmodernist movements who, shocked at the realization that words have no inherent meanings, concluded they were powerless. This was a mistake with monumental implications. The dynamic meaning of words means that language is more powerful than we ever could have thought.
Minimalists have cast more verbose writers into the role of The Wizard of Oz: where they accuse those long, winding sentences and those ten-dollar words as smoke and mirrors. Anyone who writes like that is trying too hard. Anyone who writes like that must be shaking gold flakes over a pile of shit. In American literary culture, complex language has come to be seen as dishonest.
But in its quest for the ultimate brevity, minimalism fails to be evocative. As Frank O’Connor phrased it, sometimes the “clean, well-lit room” just appears empty. Just as a mediocre writer once peppered his work with blind-grabs from the thesaurus, the modern mediocre writer, in his grail-quest for brevity, simply writes an extended Dick and Jane.
“Brevity is the soul of whit” is given as genuine advice. But if you’ve read Hamlet, you know that Polonius is the furthest thing from being brief or wise. It also, notably, appears in Shakespeare’s longest play. It is satire that our society has adopted as sagacity.
Dual forces fuel contemporary literary minimalism: anti-intellectualism and commercialism. Writing has never been a lucrative profession. Writers are forced to make passion pay-day and can only do so by appealing to as many potential customers — ahem, readers — as possible. Readers are picky. They read the first paragraph of something and easily discard it if something as implacable as “the vibe” is off.
As a child in school, we were told that if a book had more than five words we didn’t know on a single page, that it was too hard for us and to put it down. Scarcely do I remember being directed to a dictionary. It was the word’s fault for its difficulty — not our own and certainly not our teachers’.
Culture War
For the past fifty years, we have prioritized Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math over the Humanities. Neo-liberalization strips a society of all that is not “productive” (and thus profitable). So, it’s not surprise that our vocabularies have been dwindling. Our cultural prioritization of machinery and efficiency manufactured this.
But language is culture. Not only is it our primary means of communicating with each other — it’s how we communicate with the world. Our conscious manifests in words.
Language shapes our reality. As my vocabulary has grown, so has my power not only to describe things but to notice things. You may not have noticed the particular smell of post-rain pavement until you learned the word petrichor. I have never looked at a mountain — or any expanse of nature — in the same way since learning the meaning of sublime.
The year is 2025. We face new forms of oppression. We wade through unprecedented and unpredictable events. Will we have the words to one day describe what we went through — and to properly impart on our listeners it must never happen again?
In this new series, I will look examine the roots of American anti-intellectualism, how it has profoundly affected popular literature, and how it affects everything down to our thoughts.
Language enriches our lives. Each word is like a new color of thread which we use to weave a richer tapestry. Having the words to describe your sensations, your experiences, is crucial for the liberation of the soul.
Twenge, J.M., Campbell, W.K., Sherman, R.A. (2019). Declines in vocabulary among American adults within levels of educational attainment, 1974-2016. Intelligence, v.76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2019.101377.