It is true that a few really great men, such as Immanuel Kant, have seemed to revel unnecessarily in technicalities. But let not all the macronomatamaniacs [those afflicted with the disease of loving long words—kbj] of the world attempt to shelter themselves under Kant's umbrella. Kant was great in spite of his obscure language, not because of it. And one does not become great by aping the weaknesses of a great man.
It is true, too, that technical terms are a necessity. In many branches of knowledge one cannot do without them. This is especially true in science. And it is true (but in a much lesser degree) in philosophy. About their use in science I will say nothing at all. Even regarding their use in philosophy I will not attempt in this place to say what their legitimate functions are, nor legislate as to where they should be used and where avoided. For that would be itself a technical inquiry, not suitable to this paper. I will, however, set down what I regard as an elementary first principle of a good style in philosophical writing. It is this: Never use a technical term when a simple nontechnical word or phrase will equally well express your meaning. And I would add as a gloss: Cultivate in yourself a dislike and suspicion of all learned-sounding words and technical terms, a habit of regarding them not as fine things, but at best as necessary evils. This will come easily to anyone naturally endowed with a hatred of humbug, and also to anyone with an artistic sense of the beauty and value of words; and the result of it will be that, whenever a technical term springs to the writer's mind, he will instinctively cast about to see whether he cannot replace it by plain English. Sometimes it will happen that he cannot do so without prejudice to his meaning. But often it will happen that he can.
I think that these principles should be applied, not only to popular writing in the usual sense, but to all philosophical writing of whatever sort, even that which is written by experts for experts. For the use of a good style and of plain decent English will always facilitate the communication of meaning, to whomsoever it is addressed. And if anyone asks for an example of a good philosophical style, of the kind I have in mind, I would point to the writings of Mr. Bertrand Russell as showing the best philosophical style of the present day. Mr. Russell, of course, uses technical terms, plenty of them; but never, I think, where they could reasonably have been avoided.
A technical term as such is, anywhere and everywhere, a barbarism, an eyesore, an offense to the soul, a thing to be shuddered at and avoided. Macronomatamaniacs, therefore, are not only to be suspected of emptiness, but also to be accused of lack of taste. When a man uses a hideous jumble of technical terms where he could use plain English words, he writes himself down as a person without the sense of the beauty and dignity of language.
After all, the issue is a simple one. Do you wish to communicate thought? Or are you impelled by some other motive—to appear clever, to boost yourself up as a highbrow, to impress the simple-minded with your superiority, or what not? If you write an article or a book, your sole motive ought to be to communicate what you conceive to be truth to as many people as possible. If a writer is governed by this motive, it is inevitable that he will express himself in the simplest language which he can possibly find. And if, in addition to this sincerity, he has also some sense of the beauty of language, he will choose short, sharp, simple, expressive words in preference to long, uncouth, and clumsy ones. He will not, for example, write "ratiocination" when all he means is "reasoning," nor "dianoetic" when the word "intellectual" would do just as well.
Unfortunately, however, to communicate ideas is by no means the most usual motive for writing books. And if a man writes because he thinks himself a superior person, and wishes to impose this same delusion upon other people, he tends to make his style as obscure and difficult as possible. He hopes that his obscurity will be mistaken for profundity. He will write, if he can, in a learned language instead of a simple one. He will prefer big words to little ones, and a barbarous technical jargon to plain English. And the American custom of forcing university professors to "produce" (that is, to write books), and of practically making their promotion in their profession depend upon their doing so, is responsible for no little evil in this matter. Not only does it result in the publication of floods of inferior books, which the world would be much better without; not only does it compel men
who have no taste for writing, and no gift for it, to waste their time writing bad books when, if left alone, they might have made admirable and even great teachers; but it also demoralizes style, and develops macronomatamaniacs. For the man who has nothing to say worthy of publication is encouraged, almost compelled, to conceal his lack under a smoke screen of technicalities and obscure verbiage. He has to convince his university superiors of his intellectuality; and since he cannot do this by the inner worth of his thought, he must do it by putting out a spurious and pretentious conglomeration of learned-sounding words.
How easily this succeeds, how easily the world (including the learned world) is gulled by long words, the following incident may serve to illustrate. Years ago, in a certain university, there flourished a "Philosophical Society," in which the tendency to read papers couched in obscure and unintelligible language became rampant. A brilliant Irishman, wishing to prick the bubble, read before the society a paper called "The Spirit of the Age." In this paper there was not a single paragraph, not a single sentence even, which possessed, or was intended by the author to possess, the faintest glimmer of meaning. It was full of long words, of loud-mouthed phrases, of swelling periods. It sounded magnificent; it meant nothing. The society listened to it in rapt attention. Not one of the members perceived that the society was being fooled; and a long and learned discussion followed, in which not one of the members admitted that he had not understood the paper.
A man may write whole books of what is either totally meaningless or palpably false, and may secure by doing so a wide reputation, provided only that he uses long enough words. For example, the thought that there is no such thing as thought is self-contradictory nonsense. But if a man wraps up this same nonsense in a learned-sounding hocus-pocus about reflex arcs and conditioned reflexes, if he talks enough about neurons and the neural processes, and if he interlards
his whole discourse with the technical terms of physiology, he may become the founder of a school of psychology, and stands a good chance of earning an enormous salary.
(W. T. Stace, "The Snobbishness of the Learned," in Atlantic Essays, ed. Samuel N. Bogorad and Cary B. Graham [Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1958], 94-104, at 100-2 [italics in original; brackets added] [essay first published in 1936])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 