Of Sesquipedality

A thread I want to pick up from an earlier post is regarding the use of, let us say, "fancy words". I've been thinking about it lately, especially when comparing my latest text to my earlier one, and noticing the huge difference in style imposed by the mere fact that I cut off quite a bit of the pretty words in the dialogue.

And, to be quite honest, using long and complex words in excess is a negative thing. To me, it makes it seem like the writer isn't entirely in touch with his language, to the point where he/she feels that it is necessary to use these excessive words in order to express oneself properly. Usually, however, it has nothing with eloquency to do, at least when we're talking amateur writers. Then it's more a case of wishing it to sound more expressful, more vivid and descriptive.

This usually fails. In my experience, overuse of words mean nothing. It's the underlying story, the characters, the moral and the ideas of the writer that mean something. When you have a cloud of excessive words hindering access to this core concept, this means you have failed.

Look at Coelho for instance. His writing style is littered with the use of rather mundane and simple words, yet his stories are vivid, interesting, damn near legendary.

As I investigate the matter a bit online, it appears to me that a great number of classical authors have actually written in a very minimalistic style. Just to what extent they were referring at the moment, I am unsure; but I suspect I will require a field day at the City Library at some point. However, the users discussing the matter seemed rather unanimous on the point that it was indeed rather dull to read a work of that kind of simplistic manner. Again, this might just be the literary equivalent of Black Square, and that is not at all what I'd be aiming for. 

Either way, I'm trying to restrict my use of excessive and unnecessary adverbs, adjectives and in some cases verbs that just doesn't fit in with the situation at hand. Adverbs and adjective should be used to enhance your mental image, the description of whatever you're describing, not enhancing the text itself. And I suspect that's where I, and most with me, go wrong. So the next thing I write, after this whole Limbo thing (I've realized I might just call it "Mind at Rest", instead), is going to be gritty, grey, and plain.

What does overuse of words mean, anyway? This question is what I intend to look into. "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put", Winston Churchill once said. While it's certainly a point, that the overuse of archaic and stylistic English usually results in plain mockery of the language, I think it applies scarcely.