As they say around these parts.
This sentence in a paper I was reading this morning made me smile, and wonder how firmly emplanted in his cheek was the author's tongue...
"We should avoid jargonistic neologisms where relatively self-explanatory terms would serve the same purpose"
Wilson, W Daniel. "Readers in Texts." PMLA 96, no. 5 (1981): 848-63.
Or, as my parents used to say regularly when we were growing up, "never use a big word when a little one will do." Not sure academics always agree, or practise what they preach.
Comments
My gran used to deflate big word users by launching impeccably into: 'A slight inclination of the cranium is as adequate as a spasmodic movement of the left optic to an equine quadruped devoid of its visual capacity'. She has read all of Walter Scott more than once, Dickens only once cos she 'didn't take to him' the same! Her self-educated generation knew a thing or two....or three....