Avoiding the obvious
Though I have a pretty extensive vocabulary, I occasionally come across
an unfamiliar word, usually in technical contexts, but sometimes,
mystifyingly, in more ordinary prose. Here's a passage -- from
Frederick Kaufman's "Debbie does salad" (on television food shows as
porn),
Harper's Magazine,
October 2005, p. 59 -- that sent me to the dictionaries a few
days ago:
The primeval brain of the involuntary,
the abdominal brain, the brain that controls sympathy and revulsion but
not ratiocination, that is the brain of the wow.
When it comes to television, the theory becomes
practice: Whether on the Hot Network, E! Entertainment Television, or
CBS, the splanchnic response, not the lucubrations of the intellect but
the primal gut reaction--that's what hauls in the ratings.
Wow, indeed:
splanchnic.
I'm down with
ratiocination
and
lucubrations (though I
find these word choices annoyingly fancy), but
splanchnic would have been a total
zero out of context. In this context it must mean 'of the gut,
visceral', and the dictionaries confirm that it's a (Greek-derived)
medical term with this meaning. But why did Kaufman use it?
He can't really have expected many of his readers to be familiar with
it.
Here's a guess. First, he decided to refer to the gut twice, for
emphasis. (I would have counseled sticking to a single contrast
to "the lucubrations of the intellect", or however this idea gets
formulated, and then he never would have gotten into mining the far
reaches of lexicography.) One of these references can just be
with
gut: "the primal gut
reaction" above. To avoid mere repetition, the other one's going
to have to be something fancier. The obvious candidate is
visceral, but (a) it is, well,
obvious, almost clichéd, and (b) it could be read as (somewhat)
metaphorical, rather than as a literal reference to the viscera (though
gut has the very same
problem). So Kaufman hauls himself off to a thesaurus, or
consults one of the experts on anatomy he interviewed, and unearths the
shiny hundred-dollar word
splanchnic.
(If he had the word to hand already, then he's been doing way too many
Expand Your Word Power exercises.) Of course, for most readers it
doesn't actually contribute anything to the sentence and just causes
them to get hung up in the middle of it. But it certainly does
avoid the obvious.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 2, 2005 09:02 PM