From Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style: “Avoid the elaborate, the pretentious, the coy, and the cute. Do not be tempted by a twenty-dollar word when there is a ten-center handy, ready, and able. If you admire fancy words, if every sky is “beauteous,” every blonde “curvaceous,” if you are tickled by “discombobulate,” you will have a bad time with Reminder 14.

“What is wrong, you ask, with “beauteous”? No one knows, for sure. There is nothing wrong, really, with any word — all are good, but some are better than others. A matter of ear, a matter of reading the books that sharpen the ear.

“The line between the fancy and the plain, between the atrocious and the felicitous, is sometimes alarmingly fine. The question of ear is vital.”

Advice duly noted.

The thing is, I tire of lowest common denominator appeals – and so do many of my readers.

Most of my work is suited for the masses. Don’t take my word for it, though. See that search box at the top right of the screen? Type in my name…I think, after reviewing my work serially, that you’ll agree that the vast majority of what I write is pretty simpleton-friendly.

Every once in a while, though – every several posts, maybe – I cater to that other segment of my audience: The readers who, like me, tire of how-low-can-you-go pablum. Within these articles, yes, I totally play around with syntax and alliteration and parentheticals and vocabulary.

Think of it as a break from the endless game of intellectual limbo.

Not everybody likes these overtures of mine – and that’s fine. Hell, the critical disapproval is self-affirming in its own way.

xoxo
M

Mande, honey, the point of writing is to communicate. Your writing does not do that. It degenerates into obscurity almost every time. You are doing your thoughts a disservice with all this ridiculous language.

Maybe you have something useful to say. No one can tell. Calm down, write coherently, and we’ll find out.

If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re accusing me of sophistry. Surely not, because, by your own declaration, sophisms trick the reader into agreeing with the sophist – and a scroll through the comments would suggest anything but a beguiled audience.

Precisely. They are not interchangeable and you used the wrong one. A sophism is a particular argument that is fallacious. Sophistry is making heavy use of sophisms, or the practice of making deceitful arguments. Even Wiki (I know, hardly definitive, but I am lazy) highlights the distinction:

“Sophistry means making heavy use of sophisms. The word can be applied to a particular text or speech riddled with sophisms.”

Your use of the article “a” makes the word sophistry inappropriate.

I am glad your follow up led me to review the Wiki entry, as I find this section to be a particularly apt description of your writing style:

“it might use difficult words and complicated sentences to intimidate the audience into agreeing . . . . The goal of a sophism is often to make the audience believe the writer or speaker to be smarter than he or she actually is . . . .”

Just because both words share a root doesn’t mean that the suffixes are interchangeable. “A” for effort, though.

Brandon –

You needn’t read past the first sentence anyway. You managed to nick a phrase from the very first clause and repurpose it for your own comment. “A” for resourcefulness.

Isn’t that the title of the new Bond movie? Seriously, that is gibberish. While it does not clean up the underlying misuse of the terms, you could have at least used “sophism” instead of “sophistry.”