Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
At my house, it's an, 'If dad says it, you can say it' kind of deal, so a lot of my slang words come off very childish at this point in my career.
The use of the right word, the exact word, is the difference between a pencil with a sharp point and a thick crayon.
I preferred the simplest vocabulary.
Every once in a while I'll say something...I dropped the F-bomb early on in my career. There was this lesbian couple and they looked super-hip. One of them looked at me and shook her head, like "Don't do that." I think she was doing it to say, "It doesn't work." She didn't say anything but it was this cautionary moment. I knew it didn't work. There are just so many other words to choose from.
We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.
The larger your audience, the smaller your vocabulary and range of referents - the fewer your means of expression. You can't rely on the luxury of intimacy.
There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.
With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words.
Few faults of style, whether real or imaginary, excite the malignity of a more numerous class of readers, than the use of hard words.
