Look at the following words: Caustic, mullion, duffer, magistrate, minions, populace, portcullis, abhorrence, vizards, corselet, casquet, flagon, halberds, thumbscrew, phosphorescence, imminent, podgy, capricious, audacious, debonair, avidity, antimacassar.
Now guess which book I plucked these from?
(I’d turn this into a trivia game, but I don’t have the readership for a trivia game yet so you’ll find the answer if you just…
The words came from a few random pages of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, which I’ve been reading to my kids this month. They love it, despite the challenging vocabulary. My son actually knew “portcullis” because he looked it up when he was reading Angie Sage’s The Sword in the Grotto. (I had forgotten what it meant but he remembered and coughed up the definition: the iron or wooden grating that blocks a passageway of things like medieval castles and forts. I’m glad somebody’s learning something in this house.)
In my writing critique group, we often debate whether a word is the appropriate level for the kids who are in our target audience. I’m usually an advocate for skewing high. But nothing I’ve read in modern children’s literature seems to skew as high as Wind in the Willows, first published in 1908. True, if you’re going to use words like this, it has to fit with your voice and the story’s tone. Dick can’t ambulate at a fast speed; the boy needs to run. Grahame (obviously) makes it work. Next time my writing group has a debate, I’m bringing Wind in the Willows as Exhibit A.
I love precision in writing–not so much whether the word is big, but whether it’s the exact right one. I think Anne Lamott (among others) writes about this in Bird by Bird–she might have been looking for the word for the little cage on top of the champgane bottle? Big is a definite bonus, though.
Wind in the Willows, not for me.
There’s also the argument for throwing in that five-dollar word because it’s just fun to learn a new word, show it off, enjoy its sounds. I recall being amused by the word sasparilla for a good half a day.