Don't Use Big Words!

"In promulgating your esoteric cogitations, or articulating your superficial sentimentalities and amicable, philosophical or psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your conversational communications possess a clarified conciseness, a compact comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious vivacity, without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pompous prolixity, psittaceous vacuity, ventriloquial verbosity, and vainloquent vapidity. Shun double-entendre's, prurient jocosity, and pestiferous profanity, obscurant or apparent.

In other words: talk plainly, briefly, naturally, sensibly, truthfully, purely. Keep from 'slang;' don't put on airs; say what you mean; mean what you say...and don't use big words!"

Author unknown.

My mother found this fine example of doublespeak from an already old book in Shorey's Used Bookstore, downtown Seattle, when she worked there in the early 1970's. I have often wondered what sort of dementia possessed the author to extrapolate so extemporaneously on the subject of the white man's forked tongue. But let me tell you this: nothing worked better in getting me "A" grades in Psych classes then using the opposite of the author's advice when writing a term paper. If the Professor's couldn't understand what I was saying, but it seemed to make sense, how then could they objectively grade my paper? I used a quote once from Dr. Carl Gustav Jung's Collected Works that ran a half a page long in typed letters that was a full paragraph written as a single sentence! I must have that old college research paper saved somewhere in a box in the attic or basement. With my plans on returning to psychology studies in the New Year, it might be time to dig up those old term papers, dust off my copies of Jung's Collected Works, and brush up on my psychological terminology. As my mother says: "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance; baffle them with bullsh*t!" I pity my poor Professors, they don't stand a chance!