I ran across this article from The New York Times, titled, Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing. Quite an interesting article remarking on the book reviewer’s bible of well used words and phrases like “tour de force” that makes my eyes cross but that one didn’t make the list. Some of the words are familiar and a few I had to look up like…eschew. Eschew? While the words on the list are “good choices”, the problems stems from the fact that they are used so often.
To extend this further on word usage — am I the only who thinks that some author’s like to use their thesaurus a little too much? It is a pet peeve of mine when authors seem to, well, overdo it. Sometimes a simple word to convey a point of emotion, opinion or character trait or whatever will suffice. There’s no need to overdo it and pretty it up in order to sound “literary.”
It annoys me to have a new word introduced (and usually it’s a long ass new word at that) that is put in a sentence that has a simple meaning. IOW, another, more familiar word would have been much more appropriate. I know we all like to sound like we are educated people but sometimes less is more. Like most readers, I enjoy discovering new words but not at the cost of disrupting the narrative flow of the story.
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Amen! I’m with you on this one.