“I don’t use big words to show off because it’s ostentatious.”—Don Roff
In the late summer of 2004, I was invited to participate in an effort to redesign the force structure of the U.S. Army’s theater level headquarters. It wasn’t exactly an invitation, per se, but what most of us recognize as mandatory fun. We were herded like cattle into a classroom in the Combined Arms Services and Staff School wing of old Bell Hall on Fort Leavenworth, where we were greeted by an unusually sweaty—and loud—lieutenant colonel in an awkwardly form-fitting uniform.
“What we’re here to do this week,” he began, “is to detail the empirical methodologies that circumscribe the core processes that sustain efforts to re-engineer the force.”
As he continued, my brow progressively furrowed until it was a full-blown frown. I leaned over to the lieutenant colonel sitting next to me and whispered, “You know, I have a fairly robust vocabulary… and I don’t understand a single word of what he’s saying.” “That’s okay,” he replied. “He doesn’t, either. That’s what makes this job fun.”
I wish I could say that was my introduction to five-dollar words, but it wasn’t. When Mark Twain first warned, “Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do,” I think he underestimated our ability to ignore simple wisdom.
Why We Use Five-Dollar Words
Why do people feel compelled to use five-dollar words? In a 2006 article published in Applied Cognitive Psychology, Daniel Oppenheimer—a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University—acknowledged that while “most experts agree that clarity, simplicity, and parsimony are ideals” some people enjoy “deliberately using overly complex words… to sound more intelligent.” His article, aptly titled “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity,” drew on several experiments to illustrate the potential “negative consequences of needless complexity” in communicating. While some might interpret the use of five-dollar words as a sign of intelligence, the opposite is just as likely, especially when such words are habitually misused or used out of proper context. One of Oppenheimer’s experiments noted that over 86% of college students admitted to using complicated language to appear smarter to an instructor. Trust me when I say that it doesn’t work: when you write at a tenth-grade level, those words stand out like a sweaty lieutenant colonel in skin-tight BDUs.
But still we are not deterred. Our love affair with five-dollar words is, well… complicated. We like our five-dollar words. And no amount of public mockery will convince us to stop using them. Military doctrine and concepts are filled with them; why say “intuition” when “Recognition-Primed Decision Making” sounds so impressive?
And I’m as guilty as anyone. In the aftermath of the surge period during the Iraq war, the Army’s capstone concept introduced two new—and wholly undefined—terms: combined arms maneuver and wide area security. No one was quite sure what they were, but they were going to be quickly introduced into doctrine. Someone had to define them. That someone was me. “They don’t make any sense,” I told my boss when he informed me that we’d been tasked to write an article about them for Army magazine. He smiled, chuckled a little, and I got to work packing as many five-dollar words around an empty concept as I could muster. A few years later, someone with a little more authority than either of us realized that I was right, and they were quietly retired from the Army’s taxonomy (that’s a five-dollar word for “vocabulary”).
Our use of sesquipedalian (it’s a real word, trust me) prose—especially in the national security community—is often tied to budgets, which only exacerbates the issue. Whereas some people will use five-dollar words to appear more intelligent, others use them to create the illusion of something so new and revolutionary that it demands a deeper share of the budget. While the central ideas behind the Army’s AirLand Battle concept of the 1980s remain fundamental to maneuver warfare, the terms associated with them change roughly every ten years: essentially, becoming little more than old wine in a new skin. How does this manifest in the budget wars? Well, the defense contractor who sells the idea of the All-Domain Dynamic Johnson Rod Calibrator is going to be rich, that’s for sure.
Bring Common Sense to the Table
Truth be told, using a five-dollar word when a five-cent word will do—or to illustrate a two-cent idea—doesn’t make you sound intelligent. It makes you look suspect. It makes you seem a little desperate. It signals both a lack of confidence and perhaps a certain level of insecurity. Twain, who had a remarkable talent for communicating common sense to the common man (or woman), understood this. But it’s something we forget to our own demise. When tempted to use a five-dollar work, don’t. Keep it simple. Use the five-cent word, instead. So, you don’t look ostentatious.
