Expansion not Contraction

As a lover of words from my childhood and an English teacher for 30 years, the idea of giving up a word is anathema. I have taught my students to expand their vocabulary and make it more nuanced rather than contract their vocabulary and make it less fit for purpose.

George Orwell recognised this in the book 1984 when he invented Newspeak, the restrictive, very easily controlled language of the state. You could argue that we are in a situation with some similarities today as social media and its reduced character count, or its focus on getting the maximum impact in the minimum time and space is moving our languages across the world in that direction.

Let’s just imagine you wanted to remove the word hate from your vocabulary. On the face of it, that’s a laudable aim, but actually it’s just removing your ability, both lingually and cognitively, to express the full range of emotions and ideas you may have. So, you replace hate with loathe, abhor, detest, deeply dislike or take exception to. You now have five words or phrases instead of one and those words are appropriate to a whole range of situations. People will understand more precisely what you mean and you can use those words to give you the platform for a discussion not a shouting match.

So next time you think of cutting out a word, either online or offline, make sure you have at least three or four options to replace it.