A criticism I used to get in my writing is that I use big words. That’s because I have a big vocabulary. Then I’ve had people accuse me of using a thesaurus. Well guess what? In order to NOT use big words, I need a less big word to use in its place. Seriously. My writing isn’t really that high brow! Words like epitome? But what about those big words? Who gets to decide if they’re not common knowledge?

One of the reasons I’m an author is because I like language. When I see a word I don’t know, I want to know what it means. When I was little and I asked my dad what a word meant, he told me to look it up in the dictionary—so I did. The habit grew on me. Call it nerd girl fun. Aren’t other people curious? Clearly that’s not always the case.

I used to work with a woman who liked to say, “I haven’t been trained on that, To just about everything, regardless of whether she’d been trained of not. As her supervisor, I had to find a way to get her to stop saying, essentially, “I don’t know how to do that, and I’m not interested in learning,” and teach her to say, “I learned something new today.” An important job function. I was on that job more than thirty years and as I told her, every day I learned something new. You either want to understand what’s going on or you don’t.

I’ve been reading all my life, and every book teaches me something new. Sometimes, even words. One of my favorite experiences was reading about the susurrus of pine trees and I swear I could hear it! It’s like onomatopoeia (when words mimic sounds) in my head. It’s a sensory word that even now takes me for a walk in the forest.

Recently, I’ve been researching the topic I want to use in a new book. One of the first words that jumped off the page at me was apotropaic. Whoa. There’s one I’ve NEVER heard or read before. I immediately looked it up (nerd girl getting giddy). It means “Intended to ward off evil.” How did I never see this word before? In all the ghost stories and witch books and Stephen King novels did it not occur once? (Scratch that. Million dollar words. Audience doesn’t like them.) Am I going to use it? You betcha if I’m going that direction, and as one of my characters would be an expert in the field, it would occur to them naturally. Another character can plead ignorance so it can be explained. Then there’s numismatist. One who studies or collects coins. I’ve come to the conclusion some of those big words are subject sensitive. You wouldn’t randomly use apotropaic or numismatist in a book. In fact, I have to wonder if apotropaic is unique to coins. I’ve seen it used in several of the references I’ve been reading after never having seen it previously. Sorry, more nerd girl wandering.

My writing partner had a character who liked to use “fancy, million dollar words.” It was a trait. To justify it, she had the characters around him tease him about his choices. I’m not the only one itching to use the best word for a situation, even if it might be a tad highfalutin.

What’s your take on etymology? Do you like learning new words, or do they distract from your reading experience?