Yesterday I fielded a request to write my web content for the "lowest common denominator." This was a response to some copy that included two-syllable words that a high-school junior should reasonably expect to encounter on the SAT.
The request reminded me of my early career, communicating with corporate headquarters in Paris and with steel mills in "Province" (a region I sought vainly on my map of France and finally concluded was anywhere that was not Paris.)
My colleagues in Paris tended to use the informal "tu." Their sentence structures were clipped, rather American. My colleagues at the mills, on the other hand, used the formal "vous." Moreover they wrote long, flowery faxes and emails that ended with lovely phrases like, "Please accept, Madame, my most distinguished salutations."
Because of the time difference and my own halting French, I preferred to write to them rather than to telephone. I soon learned that I could make my point more effectively if I larded my prose with respectful "Madame"s and "Monsieur"s. Instead of pegging me as a brash and illiterate American asking for yet another favor (such as being sure to ship before the Great Lakes closed), the language I used made it easier for them to give me what I wanted.
I hit the goldmine one day when I found a French-English dictionary published in 1912. It oozed with the unctuous greetings I needed to go toe-to-toe with my French counterparts.
I still have that dictionary. It reminds me that different vocabularies suit different populations. Some readers appreciate and respond well to SAT words.
2 comments:
I am sometimes chastised by my friends because I will use a larger word when they think a smaller one will do. "There she goes with those college words" they will say. But if the word I want to use is right there on the tip of my tongue, why should I fish around in my cluttered brain for a smaller word. I refuse to dumb-down myself. I say, use the best word for the situation. Everyone can stand to learn something new once in awhile.
Thanks--that cracks me up. Anyone who has worked with small children knows how exhausting it is to express things in simple language. Imagine driving or doing the dishes, and simultaneously taking the time to explain racial prejudice or why we go to church, to a tot, using lovingly-selected one- and two-syllable words.
The third or the tenth time that said infant responds with the killer question, "Why?" you give up. You unleash all the SAT words. Maybe she or he will actually use them on the SATs one day.
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