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Why Use A Big Word Where A Diminutive One Will Suffice?

A few weeks ago, one of my friends who reads my blog (and doesn't comment, just like so many of you) asked my why the vocabulary I use in my blogs isn't all fancy and flowery. Largely, this is because my classmates think of me as a walking, talking dictionary of sorts. You see, a few years ago, I used to be a big spelling bee freak, and I used to keep winning those, and my classmates got wind of them and my nickname became, much to my consternation, "Dictionary". Not that there's anything wrong with dictionaries - I'm sure they're all perfectly wonderful books. My problem is with being called "Dictionary" when I have a perfectly wonderful name like "Ritvik".

The thing is, I generally make it a point not to use big words. Not because I think my audience is dumb - you yourself, for instance, are a prime example of the crème de la crème of intellectual society. No, really, I can see that from here. I write with diminutive vocabulary to avoid lexical thickets such as the one forming very rapidly in this paragraZZZZ.....

Oh! Oh my goodness! What? A blog, you say? Terribly sorry about that. I fell asleep because of the somnambulant (See? There I go again, using long words!) nature of that long, confusing paragraph above. But that's the thing about languages. You can say the same thing so that a five year old could grasp it with ease or you can say it such that it would take a grammarian some minutes with a dictionary to understand precisely what it is that you're yakking on about.

It's one of the things that make me love writing in a not overly-complicated way. It makes me feel smarter than writing in perplexing, complicated English ever could, because it seems like something that other people can grasp without too much difficulty. And that's my favourite thing about languages: they allow me to tell others about all the brilliant (read: somewhat crazy) things floating through my head. Anyway, I think I've taken quite enough of your time (and mine, in order to write this post). Now why don't you go do something constructive, like read a book or read a newspaper or read another one of my blog posts?

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