Bring back hypnagogia!! I’m a firm believer that the people who are meant to appreciate your writing will appreciate the specificity of your word choices.
I think a part of why people are so scared of being challenged by big words/complex ideas is because they’re then forced to confront their lack of knowledge, which translates to “their lack of intelligence” in their heads. And instead of looking at their potential lack of intelligence as an invitation to learn more, they become defensive.
I second all of this! People are also lazy. They don’t want to look up words. Which is absurd if they’re fellow writers. Studying vocabulary is a joy and a necessity for my life as a writer. It is an integral part of our craft. Wild times.
Great essay! One thing I find interesting about language use in particular is that eccentricity can be the mark of the autodidact, not the University-educated intellectual. I'm all for unique voice. I try to spice up my pretentious tendencies with a bit of vernacular (in my case I speak 'New Zealand'), so it’s not entirely pseudy...
Basically it's difficult to be a writer with risking trying to seem smart, it's what we do & for a lot of us, what we've always done. Revenge of the nerds ha ha
i respect you for verbalising your pretentious tendencies and simply accepting they exist, it strikes me as something i avoided doing in this essay. as you've probably noticed, i enjoy mixing highfalutin with Black vernacular. the difficulty, for me, is finding the measurements that are optimal--both beautiful in how it flows from mind to pen and how lands on and flies off the page. that balance is my spinning plate to steady. i imagine others are simply trying to discover and manage their own spinning plate(s).
Spinning plates, yes. It's tricky, because one's writing voice can be a perfectly accurate representation of the way one talks and the way others talk in real life yet still be 'read' a certain way. But I feel it's important to be honest & precise in language use, & I accept the outcome that in my cultural context I will sometimes be read as pretentious. I'm often seeking for the 'right' word or the 'best' word, by which I mean the most accurate word-- I find that trying to clearly convey meaning cuts through self-consciousness.
But basically, mocking intellectualism is mostly just another way of shutting people up, so I try to ignore it. BTW I don't find your writing at all pretentious. It feels muscular & smart & interesting
I just found your writing, and I love it. I encounter a similar, if not the same phenomenon frequently in scientific research (I’m a PhD student in engineering who learned math out of stubbornness but like you, reads the dictionary for fun). We are told to write “plain language” versions of our work now to increase public understanding. I do understand and relate to this, because I know exactly what it’s like to be a product of underfunded public schools and simply not know “jargon.” However…we lose a lot when we rely on simplistic replacements for what the true meaning was. Like literature and using “pretentious” words, we lose beauty and precision when we use simplified synonyms. We are expected to invent overly general analogies just to make people feel like they understood and therefore are willing to invest in our work, but the reality is that it takes years of learning to understand it, and analogies are very, very poor translations of true nuance and its beauty.
Language is an art, not just a tool for some rhetorical end, and I think this is what people lack appreciation of when they demand accessibility, as you reference. Art forms do not have to bend to the viewer’s preferences, and in fact they are horribly cheapened when they do. Perhaps it is all a function of our consume-consume-consume culture - we think we deserve everything in the easiest package and delivered to us in a way that requires zero learning and effort on our part. It’s like we are now taught that it is morally good to feel entitled to ease in every way. But art is not easeful, and meaning sometimes requires structures of nuance that take effort to learn. How do we fix this? I don’t know…probably making students read books in public schools. Anyway - thank you for your beautiful writing, you give me hope that humans and their systems of meaning might possibly survive the brain-smashing world we live in now.
thank you. this lit a fire in me for many reasons. some books I read in a week, others over 5 years. I still enjoyed them despite the difference in focus they required.
i appreciate that this essay addresses the relationship between language and the way it shapes our thinking, thus our perception of reality. I feel that many who should know better would rather ignore this. for the modern world this poses an existential question of how much we really stand to benefit from outsourcing our brain power, even for menial tasks. in a time of fully matured anti-intellectualism, what constitutes effective communication: objectively (if it’s possible to identify an objective reference point for this) accessible word choice, or leaving someone with the opportunity to learn something new? I’m still struggling with this question.
at one point, I believed speaking in a way that i perceived as accessible allowed me to overcome communication barriers with people who may not have had the same educational background, especially since higher education is not accessible in the US. i recall the pushback in some leftist circles, criticizing the language and pedagogy for teaching topics like gender, racial, and economic disparities as too dense and inaccessible to a reader without a higher ed degree. however, there exists a tipping point where there is no longer the vocabulary available to accurately convey an idea, and the relative lack of descriptive words in the English language (compared to other languages) exacerbates this further. so really i could police my word choice ad infinitum, and never touch the root issue of many folks lacking, or outright rejecting, the basic tools to process abstract concepts in the first place. let’s be real that it’s just as easy to web search the definition of hypnagogia as it is a recent football score.
i grew up in Oklahoma. i believe we recently fell from 49th in the country for education to 50th in the US. anti-intellectualism provides the illusion that being uneducated is a choice, rather than a product of right-wing propaganda and policy. you won’t miss something if you believe you never wanted it in the first place. since moving back, I’ve expressed resentment to my peers that i felt my English degree was a waste of money, it didn’t help me get ahead, college is a shitty institution for x y and z reasons, and I probably would not choose it again. in 2025, I’m eating crow for unintentionally playing into the hands of those that want this mindset to flourish. I would get my English degree 100 more times. thanks again.
I love what you said about using specific, complex words. I’ve seen the “accessible language” discourse before and it never sat right with me, and I think you did a good job articulating why. There is such a wealth of knowledge that IS accessible to (nearly) everyone, via the internet, such that specific and complex words can be identified in less than a minute. Thanks for the great read C:
This actually speaks to something that is so profoundly worrying about all this.
As a kid, I had to swipe through the pages of a chunky dictionary if I wanted to learn the meaning of a word. Now we have supercomputers in our pockets that can give us definitions in mere seconds.
How much more accessible does language need to be? You cannot copy and paste your vocabulary into someone else's mind and yet, this is premise that "accessible language" relies on. It suggests any difficulty is a marginalisation. The notion of meeting a challenge requires not for us to rise to the occasion but demand the bar be lowered to a height that we can leap over. Anything less than comfort is touted as systemically unfair. But we will never be able to make the world completely without friction.
great writing as usual, I should've read this sooner! and trying not to be too 'everything is linked!', I can't help but wonder how much the idea you posed here about how 'Our cultural understanding of morality and intellectualism are fundamentally defined by distrust' has to do with our short discussion on Notes the other day about how politics and religion/faith work in tandem. I wonder if this cultural understanding is so strongly linked to distrust because of how detached we have become from faith. does our distrust partly stem from our loss of faith, and we're projecting this onto others, assuming they have no reason to tell the truth because we don't give any value to honesty in our modern, more science-oriented world? personally, I'm not entirely sure, but just a thought I had while reading. I look forward to your next post Inigo!
'Our cultural understanding of morality and intellectualism are fundamentally defined by distrust' is definitely linked to a growing detachment (and also bastardisation) of spiritual faith because faith is essentially divine trust.
Faith is so powerful (and manipulatable) because it bypasses the practitioner's urge to question it and, by extension, question themselves. There's a purposeful peace that comes with that and without it, we worship at the altar of "being right", questioning becomes a more indigenous state, and distrust prevails as a defence mechanism from psychic damage.
But protecting oneself from that psychic damage means only engaging in "our modern, more science-oriented world" to the comfortable limit of one's own comprehension--which is why anti-trans advocates are obsessed with invoking basic (physical) biology rather than engaging more complicated sciences like neurobiology, complex genetics (and even "social sciences").
All to say – Yeah, lack/bastardisation* of faith and omni-presence of distrust are linked factors.
(*This is also to say that faith-based societies that do not encourage intellectual, moral and empathetic curiosity such as the religious fundamentalism currently tearing through American society are also heavily prone to distrust cc: Salem Witch Trials. So although faith and distrust are linked--I don't think its as simple as the absence or presence of religious faith creating more or less distrust, just difference.)
I've read two of your works so far but I knew this was you without looking at the author because you started with zenith (which very excited to see in action, I learned it a few days ago). every choice we make as writers accumulates into a signature, a mark, a fingerprint.
your “no offense” cow has obviously missed the fact that beginning your statement with “no offense” guarantees that offense was meant and will be taken.
i was taught to “know the audience”. i don’t use a thesaurus word when a plain spoken version will suffice if i’m addressing an audience whose reading comprehension isn’t the same as mine.
i was a weird thesaurus/dictionary reading child as well.
what i don’t do is censor myself. i do use big words. i also don’t give two shits whether people find me pretentious if that’s not my intention.
normal people just look a word up or ask what it means or ignore it completely. self righteous asshats police other people’s language. period.
i think this essay is governed by the implication that a culture sliding towards anti-intellectualism and anti-pretension will slowly change what normal people do in the presence of (challenging) knowledge.
anti-intellectualism constipates curiosity to where we'd not only ignore an unrecognised word in a piece of text but write off the full text altogether. anti-pretentiousness compels us to police the very usage of the unrecognised word itself for being too inaccessible.
perhaps both are becoming more prevalent in correlation to growing expectations of convenience.
The advice is: "Write in a way accessible to the reader".
This always bothers me because how am I supposed to know who "the reader" might be.
Should I then default to writing everything at 3rd grade level?
I appreciate a writer who sends me to the dictionary once or twice in every several pieces (or chapters) - so long as the trip is worth the travel, and useful to the presentation. This is an enrichment of my world, experience, and understanding - even beyond the words they left on the page.
The advice to "write in a way accessible to the reader" is well-intentioned, I think. It's an attempt to encourage writers to appeal to the largest bracket of people possible... Writing simply, at a 3rd grade level, would definitely ensure mass legibility. But I also think it disregards the symbiosis of literature by suggesting the writer contort their work to meet the reader where they are as it's just as much the prerogative of the reader to meet the writer where they are.
Bring back hypnagogia!! I’m a firm believer that the people who are meant to appreciate your writing will appreciate the specificity of your word choices.
I think a part of why people are so scared of being challenged by big words/complex ideas is because they’re then forced to confront their lack of knowledge, which translates to “their lack of intelligence” in their heads. And instead of looking at their potential lack of intelligence as an invitation to learn more, they become defensive.
Great essay!
I second all of this! People are also lazy. They don’t want to look up words. Which is absurd if they’re fellow writers. Studying vocabulary is a joy and a necessity for my life as a writer. It is an integral part of our craft. Wild times.
Exactly!!! Learning new words not only expands our understanding of our experiences but it also expands the depth with which we can tell our stories
Precisely! 💥💘
Great essay! One thing I find interesting about language use in particular is that eccentricity can be the mark of the autodidact, not the University-educated intellectual. I'm all for unique voice. I try to spice up my pretentious tendencies with a bit of vernacular (in my case I speak 'New Zealand'), so it’s not entirely pseudy...
Basically it's difficult to be a writer with risking trying to seem smart, it's what we do & for a lot of us, what we've always done. Revenge of the nerds ha ha
i respect you for verbalising your pretentious tendencies and simply accepting they exist, it strikes me as something i avoided doing in this essay. as you've probably noticed, i enjoy mixing highfalutin with Black vernacular. the difficulty, for me, is finding the measurements that are optimal--both beautiful in how it flows from mind to pen and how lands on and flies off the page. that balance is my spinning plate to steady. i imagine others are simply trying to discover and manage their own spinning plate(s).
Spinning plates, yes. It's tricky, because one's writing voice can be a perfectly accurate representation of the way one talks and the way others talk in real life yet still be 'read' a certain way. But I feel it's important to be honest & precise in language use, & I accept the outcome that in my cultural context I will sometimes be read as pretentious. I'm often seeking for the 'right' word or the 'best' word, by which I mean the most accurate word-- I find that trying to clearly convey meaning cuts through self-consciousness.
But basically, mocking intellectualism is mostly just another way of shutting people up, so I try to ignore it. BTW I don't find your writing at all pretentious. It feels muscular & smart & interesting
I just found your writing, and I love it. I encounter a similar, if not the same phenomenon frequently in scientific research (I’m a PhD student in engineering who learned math out of stubbornness but like you, reads the dictionary for fun). We are told to write “plain language” versions of our work now to increase public understanding. I do understand and relate to this, because I know exactly what it’s like to be a product of underfunded public schools and simply not know “jargon.” However…we lose a lot when we rely on simplistic replacements for what the true meaning was. Like literature and using “pretentious” words, we lose beauty and precision when we use simplified synonyms. We are expected to invent overly general analogies just to make people feel like they understood and therefore are willing to invest in our work, but the reality is that it takes years of learning to understand it, and analogies are very, very poor translations of true nuance and its beauty.
Language is an art, not just a tool for some rhetorical end, and I think this is what people lack appreciation of when they demand accessibility, as you reference. Art forms do not have to bend to the viewer’s preferences, and in fact they are horribly cheapened when they do. Perhaps it is all a function of our consume-consume-consume culture - we think we deserve everything in the easiest package and delivered to us in a way that requires zero learning and effort on our part. It’s like we are now taught that it is morally good to feel entitled to ease in every way. But art is not easeful, and meaning sometimes requires structures of nuance that take effort to learn. How do we fix this? I don’t know…probably making students read books in public schools. Anyway - thank you for your beautiful writing, you give me hope that humans and their systems of meaning might possibly survive the brain-smashing world we live in now.
thank you. this lit a fire in me for many reasons. some books I read in a week, others over 5 years. I still enjoyed them despite the difference in focus they required.
i appreciate that this essay addresses the relationship between language and the way it shapes our thinking, thus our perception of reality. I feel that many who should know better would rather ignore this. for the modern world this poses an existential question of how much we really stand to benefit from outsourcing our brain power, even for menial tasks. in a time of fully matured anti-intellectualism, what constitutes effective communication: objectively (if it’s possible to identify an objective reference point for this) accessible word choice, or leaving someone with the opportunity to learn something new? I’m still struggling with this question.
at one point, I believed speaking in a way that i perceived as accessible allowed me to overcome communication barriers with people who may not have had the same educational background, especially since higher education is not accessible in the US. i recall the pushback in some leftist circles, criticizing the language and pedagogy for teaching topics like gender, racial, and economic disparities as too dense and inaccessible to a reader without a higher ed degree. however, there exists a tipping point where there is no longer the vocabulary available to accurately convey an idea, and the relative lack of descriptive words in the English language (compared to other languages) exacerbates this further. so really i could police my word choice ad infinitum, and never touch the root issue of many folks lacking, or outright rejecting, the basic tools to process abstract concepts in the first place. let’s be real that it’s just as easy to web search the definition of hypnagogia as it is a recent football score.
i grew up in Oklahoma. i believe we recently fell from 49th in the country for education to 50th in the US. anti-intellectualism provides the illusion that being uneducated is a choice, rather than a product of right-wing propaganda and policy. you won’t miss something if you believe you never wanted it in the first place. since moving back, I’ve expressed resentment to my peers that i felt my English degree was a waste of money, it didn’t help me get ahead, college is a shitty institution for x y and z reasons, and I probably would not choose it again. in 2025, I’m eating crow for unintentionally playing into the hands of those that want this mindset to flourish. I would get my English degree 100 more times. thanks again.
I love what you said about using specific, complex words. I’ve seen the “accessible language” discourse before and it never sat right with me, and I think you did a good job articulating why. There is such a wealth of knowledge that IS accessible to (nearly) everyone, via the internet, such that specific and complex words can be identified in less than a minute. Thanks for the great read C:
This actually speaks to something that is so profoundly worrying about all this.
As a kid, I had to swipe through the pages of a chunky dictionary if I wanted to learn the meaning of a word. Now we have supercomputers in our pockets that can give us definitions in mere seconds.
How much more accessible does language need to be? You cannot copy and paste your vocabulary into someone else's mind and yet, this is premise that "accessible language" relies on. It suggests any difficulty is a marginalisation. The notion of meeting a challenge requires not for us to rise to the occasion but demand the bar be lowered to a height that we can leap over. Anything less than comfort is touted as systemically unfair. But we will never be able to make the world completely without friction.
great writing as usual, I should've read this sooner! and trying not to be too 'everything is linked!', I can't help but wonder how much the idea you posed here about how 'Our cultural understanding of morality and intellectualism are fundamentally defined by distrust' has to do with our short discussion on Notes the other day about how politics and religion/faith work in tandem. I wonder if this cultural understanding is so strongly linked to distrust because of how detached we have become from faith. does our distrust partly stem from our loss of faith, and we're projecting this onto others, assuming they have no reason to tell the truth because we don't give any value to honesty in our modern, more science-oriented world? personally, I'm not entirely sure, but just a thought I had while reading. I look forward to your next post Inigo!
'Our cultural understanding of morality and intellectualism are fundamentally defined by distrust' is definitely linked to a growing detachment (and also bastardisation) of spiritual faith because faith is essentially divine trust.
Faith is so powerful (and manipulatable) because it bypasses the practitioner's urge to question it and, by extension, question themselves. There's a purposeful peace that comes with that and without it, we worship at the altar of "being right", questioning becomes a more indigenous state, and distrust prevails as a defence mechanism from psychic damage.
But protecting oneself from that psychic damage means only engaging in "our modern, more science-oriented world" to the comfortable limit of one's own comprehension--which is why anti-trans advocates are obsessed with invoking basic (physical) biology rather than engaging more complicated sciences like neurobiology, complex genetics (and even "social sciences").
All to say – Yeah, lack/bastardisation* of faith and omni-presence of distrust are linked factors.
(*This is also to say that faith-based societies that do not encourage intellectual, moral and empathetic curiosity such as the religious fundamentalism currently tearing through American society are also heavily prone to distrust cc: Salem Witch Trials. So although faith and distrust are linked--I don't think its as simple as the absence or presence of religious faith creating more or less distrust, just difference.)
I've read two of your works so far but I knew this was you without looking at the author because you started with zenith (which very excited to see in action, I learned it a few days ago). every choice we make as writers accumulates into a signature, a mark, a fingerprint.
love this.
your “no offense” cow has obviously missed the fact that beginning your statement with “no offense” guarantees that offense was meant and will be taken.
i was taught to “know the audience”. i don’t use a thesaurus word when a plain spoken version will suffice if i’m addressing an audience whose reading comprehension isn’t the same as mine.
i was a weird thesaurus/dictionary reading child as well.
what i don’t do is censor myself. i do use big words. i also don’t give two shits whether people find me pretentious if that’s not my intention.
normal people just look a word up or ask what it means or ignore it completely. self righteous asshats police other people’s language. period.
i think this essay is governed by the implication that a culture sliding towards anti-intellectualism and anti-pretension will slowly change what normal people do in the presence of (challenging) knowledge.
anti-intellectualism constipates curiosity to where we'd not only ignore an unrecognised word in a piece of text but write off the full text altogether. anti-pretentiousness compels us to police the very usage of the unrecognised word itself for being too inaccessible.
perhaps both are becoming more prevalent in correlation to growing expectations of convenience.
Another really solid piece.
The advice is: "Write in a way accessible to the reader".
This always bothers me because how am I supposed to know who "the reader" might be.
Should I then default to writing everything at 3rd grade level?
I appreciate a writer who sends me to the dictionary once or twice in every several pieces (or chapters) - so long as the trip is worth the travel, and useful to the presentation. This is an enrichment of my world, experience, and understanding - even beyond the words they left on the page.
Just my experience...
The advice to "write in a way accessible to the reader" is well-intentioned, I think. It's an attempt to encourage writers to appeal to the largest bracket of people possible... Writing simply, at a 3rd grade level, would definitely ensure mass legibility. But I also think it disregards the symbiosis of literature by suggesting the writer contort their work to meet the reader where they are as it's just as much the prerogative of the reader to meet the writer where they are.