NPR editor admonishes wordsmiths: Abnegate ostentatious locutions

Good advice in a memo by NPR standards & practices editor Mark Memmott: When Looking For The Right Words, Beware Of “Imagined Elegance.”

The phrase comes from that old standby, Strunk and White, quoted here from the entry on the word “transpire”:

“Not to be used in the sense of ‘happen,’ ‘come to pass.’ Many writers so use it (usually when groping toward imagined elegance), but their usage finds little support in the Latin ‘breathe across or through.’”

I have all kinds of problems with Strunk and White, and I would ask in this case: Who cares what the Latin anything has to say? We’re not speaking Latin. The old slavish devotion to Latin, a language that is, not to put to fine a point on it, dead, gave us dumb rules like not splitting infinitives.

But, to end the digression, “groping toward imagined elegance” is an elegant way of describing what we do when we reach for a $5 word when a 50-cent word will do, in the supposed words of Mark Twain, also cited by Memmott in the memo.

Memmott rightly points out that “There are times to use $5 words.” Sometimes le mot juste is a fancy one. But here’s a better point: “There is a real—not imagined—elegance to clear, simple story-telling.”