William K. Thayer
All Hallows’ Eve, 2025
Beyond the fact that they are all famous authors, what did writers like Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Jules Vern, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, O’Henry, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, George Eliot, and Franz Kafka have in common?
A remarkable grasp of language, from my observations as a fan of their stories and books.
I have stepped up my reading since retiring and have been enjoying some of the old classics. Reading (or in some cases re-reading) them now that I can do so at a relaxed pace without the pressure on me that was always there during my education and career years. Including Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “Astoria”. Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”. Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”. Jules Vern’s “A Journey to the Center of the Earth”. Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”. Mark Twain’s “The War Prayer” (and all his short stories). Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”, and “The Brothers Karamazov”. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (and other stories like “Providence and The Guitar”). Rudyard Kipling’s “Captains Courageous”, “The Jungle Books”, and “Rikki Tikki Tavi”. O’Henry’s “Cabbages and Kings”. Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”. Leo Tolstoy’s “Resurrection”, and “The Death of Ivan Ilych”. “The Lifted Veil” by George Eliot (the pen name for Mary Ann Evans). And Franz Kafka’s “The Trial”.
I am continually amazed at the breadth of literacy on display in these and other writings by authors of the olden days. I find myself frequently looking up words in the dictionary to keep pace with and appreciate the remarkable descriptive resplendence of their writing.
The word portraits in such stories and books are at times so beautiful and creative that I will, while reading, pause and ask my wife Lori to just listen to me while I read a page or two aloud. She does, and after, we just both shake our heads in amazement.
Which brings me to the point of this piece: Writers of today face a dilemma posed by the rapidly changing—unfortunately diminishing—ability of prospective readers to comprehend descriptive words that have evidently fallen out of regular use. How should writers respond?
There is of course the risk of being perceived as being a pedantic writer—one who makes an unnecessary show of knowledge. But I’m here to argue that more precise, nuanced, and yes, even decorative, words should indeed be used—even when the writer might recognize many readers will need to pause briefly and reach for a reference source to understand the meaning intended.
The fact is that the changeover in the last decade or two from obtaining information from books, newspapers and maps, to relying completely upon handheld devices like smartphones, tablets and GPS screens, has resulted in all of us ending up with shortened attention spans and a working grasp of only the basic words and abbreviations necessary to satisfy our most immediate information needs. Rarely can we take an uninterrupted hour or more away from our phones, tablets, or videos to engage in reading a good old-fashioned book. Words like “sedulous”, “indefatigable”, “fleshings”, “omnibus”, “divination”, “besotted”, “rakish”, and “indefeasible” (to pull, by way of example, just a few adjectives out of the first two chapters of Stevenson’s short “Providence and The Guitar”, mentioned above) do not regularly appear in the texting or emails that we now so frequently use (through the aid of our electronic devices) to gather information and communicate during the course of a normal day. What we typically observe on our devices, beyond photos and videos, are merely minimalist descriptions and three letter abbreviations.
I have seen news pieces that indicate that the average reading ability in our country today is down to a seventh or eighth grade level. I don’t know if that is true or not. I suspect people who might be reading this are “reading people” who are well above that average, as I hope I am. In any event, my question becomes, should those who wish to write creatively today actively exercise such vocabulary as they may have, or instead, restrict their language usage when writing, and thereby simply cater to the broader audience that hasn’t the time or interest to consult a dictionary when words beyond those immediately understood might be encountered?
The sad thing is, if everyone who writes stories, novels, and poems in our modern-day world (and off into the future) limits the words they use to those which are commonplace in our regular conversations and communications of today, a gradual deflowering of the English language will inevitably occur over time, will it not? With dictionaries getting shorter in length as each new edition comes out—with words like “obsequious”, “termagant”, and “patrimonial” (adjectives used in the early pages of “Rip Van Winkle”) deleted due to a complete and utter lack of continuing usage.
I reckon that’s not what I want to see. As you absorb a short novella like “Rip Van Winkle” and become acquainted with the travails of a hen-pecked husband, would you rather read this, “She was a mean one. LOL.” Or admire the manner in which Washington Irving elected to describe the shrillness of his protagonist’s wife, “A tart temper never mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.”
In any event, no matter where we are headed, at least the works of Irving, Dickens, Melville, and all of the now-dead sister and brotherhood of brilliant expressive writers will remain out there somewhere in the remnants of historical literature, for anyone—curious and still in possession of a 19th Century volume of Webster’s Dictionary—to read and enjoy, in all of their original splendiferous glory.