paperclip dictionaryI 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.