The Value of (Big) Words

From the perspective of a character on the sports beat at a major magazine, novelist Richard Ford said that being a sportswriter is more like being a salesman than being a real writer.\n"In so many ways," wrote Ford in The Sportswriter, "words are just our currency, our medium of exchange with our readers, and there is very little that is ever genuinely creative to it at all."\nThat might explain why vocabulary on the nation's sports pages is typically the piggy bank version rather than the Swiss numbered account kind. Readers, it is held, prefer the ordinary word in their sports news. They want plenty of commentary about Barry Bonds smashing the ball outta sight but not in words with outta-sight prices. Perhaps, too, the writers at the majors do not have a high-interest bearing account at the lexicon bank.\nOne publication with its own vault of unusual words, however, is Sports Illustrated, the weekly magazine with a weekly readership of over 20 million. A recent issue contained several gems. There's pulchritudinous, caterwauling, obeisance, ignominious, nonplussed, even überteam and überfan, which require the international exchange rate for Deutsche marks.\nThe next week's number of Sports Illustrated included some truly precious words, such as bellowing, acrimony, churlishness and parrying. And from one article alone came taciturn, laconic, acolytes, quotidian, abject, palpable and palliative.\nContext, declares the unprompted whiz in freshman composition, will make known the unknown word. Maybe. Take pulchritudinous. \nThat word is used in an article about the hottest Russian tennis players on the pro circuit, who also happen to be savvy, hot-looking women. Specifically, the word is used to describe tennis pin-up Anna Kournikova: "History will probably recall Kournikova as an underachieving player, albeit a pulchritudinous one." \nThe writer alludes to Kournikova's evident attributes, but what quality exactly does pulchritudinous point to or describe? One thesaurus lists several synonyms for pulchritude, the noun. On the roster are loveliness, attractiveness, comeliness and beauty. Which one is it? Does the effort required to find out the denotative, and connotative, meaning of this five-syllable word cost too much? \nWhen it comes to the unusual word, there is only one person to turn to for coaching. William F. Buckley Jr. is known to use a big word or two, aside from the technical terminology required in his articles and books on sailing. He explains, in commercial terms, the genesis of the unusual word.\n"That word exists," Buckley said, "because there was what the economists would call, a 'felt need' for it, that is, no other word around did what this particular word does."\nAsking a writer to suppress the unusual word because the reader might not know its meaning is like asking pianist Thelonious Monk not to play some unfamiliar chords because the listener does not know them, according to Buckley.\nBeyond the big word, one of the recent issues of Sports Illustrated even asks its readers to have some awareness of the German preposition "über." Why should the magazine apologize or be criticized for using the foreign word or phrase? \nA.J. Liebling, the foremost writer on the boxing scene for years and perhaps the finest sportswriter ever, covered the sweet science not only for Sports Illustrated but also The New Yorker, with its discerning readership. \nIn a Sports Illustrated article about a boxing club, which is collected in the magazine's "Fifty Years of Great Writing," Liebling brings into play not only French but Latin, which is a dead language even the Catholic Church stopped using 40 years ago: succes d'estime, mouchoirs, in abstentia and a poetic transposition of non compos mentis. And he does so sans explanation, against the recommendation of journalism's leading style manual.\nSaving writers who use or want to use a foreign word, and soothing their readers who might gripe, again is Buckley, whose third language is English, after Spanish and French. "Delicately used," he observes, "(foreign words) do bring little piquancies and with them -- well, aperçus, which, because they are extra-idiomatic, give you a fresh view of the subject." \nThere's more to the foreign phrase. It has a tone that pleases the refined ear, which the best scriveners know. And that's probably what inspired Liebling over the years as he orchestrated his way with a world of words, scoring the loveliest rendition of all, then and now.\nSportswriters have an obligation to the public that transcends the journalistic principle of merely reporting all the sports news that's fit to print. As professional writers, their responsibility is the guardianship of words, even the unusual ones. Besides, readers just might appreciate learning the definition of an unfamiliar word and adding it to their own lexical ledger. \nThat's why using the big word when it is appropriate, even on the sports page, is priceless. \n- Contact staff writer Bill Meehan at wmeehan@indiana.edu.