Of Vanity in Words

A rhetorician of antiquity said that his profession was to make great things small and small things great. Let him answer for that — it is a shameful art when used to deceive, and useful only when it reveals what ordinary speech conceals. But we have made it ordinary speech. We speak now with such elaboration and such care for ornament that the thought, if there was one, has been quite buried by the time we have finished. A plain sentence frightens us. We dress every observation in so many qualifications and refinements that no one can any longer say what we meant, including ourselves.

I have noticed that men of the deepest learning speak most simply. They have reached the other side of difficulty and found the open ground there, where a thing can be named in one word because it has been understood. The man who needs twenty words to say what could be said in two has not fully understood the thing he is describing. He is filling the space of his uncertainty with syllables. The syllables are not empty exactly — they carry real effort, real sincerity sometimes — but they carry confusion dressed as profundity, which is the most common garment of confusion.

Words are the counters of wise men and the money of fools.

There is a particular vanity in legal and official language that takes the prize. It is written to be impenetrable, not because the matter is difficult, but because impenetrability protects those who write it. A law that could be understood by the man it governs would be a law that could be questioned by him. The obscurity is a form of power, not a consequence of complexity. I say this not as a radical but as an observer: the same impulse that makes a man speak in circles in ordinary conversation makes an institution write in circles by habit and by design. The cure in both cases is the same — a preference for being understood over being impressive.