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but writers generally come by their vocabulary honestly, by having read a great deal more than the average person
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All well and good, but I'd venture to say that my own vocabulary is much larger than your average English Literature Prof specifically because the vast majority of what I read is very old. But having a large and old vocabulary, and purposely using it to show how many words you know that others do not, are very different things, and I believe that describes most of the modern LF writers. If that's what great writing is about then I could just write everything in 14th century English, or even West Saxon etc. If I'm writing a period piece, that may be fine, but it's hard to see the point even in that. Shakespeare was often criticized for writing in an archaic language during his own day (late 1500s) just as the
King James Bible was criticized for the same thing when it first came out in 1611. People had stopped using words like "thee" and "thou" by the 13th and 14th centuries. (I find it mildly amusing the way people refer to 14th century English as "Jacobean English" when people had stopped talking that way long before James VI.) In the case of the
King James Bible, negative critics of it said that it was purposely dressed up in an archaic language to make it seem more regal and flowery. They also said that if it was truly sent by God that it shouldn't need any dressing up. Makes sense to me.
If 14th century English is so grand, why not just write everything in it? I've seen several people claim that the works of Homer are best read in the Lang/Leaf/Butcher/Myers translation for that very reason. I find that totally silly. I'm supposed to think that works from 800 BC Greek are somehow best followed in 14th century English by 21st century readers? I've got those translations of both
The Iliad and
The Odyssey, but I find my Penguin Classic editions much more enjoyable.
I think that some of you are missing the point, which is, that modern writers who purposely use one out-dated word after another are not only being pretentious (if not outright childish), but they usually don't write good stories. I would say that Umberto Eco would be a great example, but I lay a lot of the blame on William Weaver's translations for the pretentious English. The stories (at least many of them) being boring however, we can put on Eco. I recall starting to read
Foucault's Pendulum, and the first thirty or forty pages were devoted to some character trying to find a place to hide in a museum. We couldn't just be told where he hid; we had to first be put through every place he couldn't hide. I was on the brink of tearing my hair out thinking, "Just get on with it already!" It was just bad writing in any language.
I'll muddle through even the most pretentious writing if I think the stories are worth it, but I certainly won't refer to it as great writing if I think the author is being purposely, and pointlessly, difficult. The perfect example there is Charles Williams. I loved all seven of his novels, but what 20th century writer is more difficult to get through than Williams? This is especially true of his poetry, which even his friend T. S. Eliot said he could never make heads or tails of. Almost everyone agrees that he's made the only significant addition to the Grail saga since Tennyson, but almost none of us would understand half of his poetry (both symbolically and the difficult writing style) without his friend, CS Lewis', commentary on it. I can't quote it exactly, but I remember a letter from Lewis to Eliot where Lewis had mentioned talking with Williams right after one of Williams' novels came out saying "Don't think I didn't let into him for all I was worth for being so damned difficult!" In short, as much as I loved the novels and poetry of Charles Williams, I loathed his writing style, which in my opinion, as well as the opinions of Eliot and Lewis, was often difficult just for the sake of being difficult.
And that phrase right there "difficult for the sake of being difficult" is exactly what most of us dislike about much of the modern LF writers.