Length: 2,200 words/8 minutes

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 movie Rope is unusual in that the entire story unfolds in a single location—a large apartment. Hitchcock had already used the idea of a limited space in Lifeboat and would stick with it to great success in Dial M for Murder.

Many of the scenes were shot uninterrupted and last for ten minutes—ten minutes being the length of a color film reel in the late 1940s. This was quite hard for the cast and crew. If they made the slightest mistake it meant re-filming the entire scene—up to ten minutes at a take.

The story evokes the famous 1924 Leopold and Loew murder of 14-year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago—a slaying that was planned to be the “perfect” crime by the very bright duo of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loew. Well, at least they were considered exceptionally smart until they chose to be killers…

Rope takes place not in 1920s Chicago but in upscale 1940s New York City where two Harvard aesthetes also plot the perfect crime—in this case, the slaying of one of their classmates. The dirty deed having been done right at the very start of the film, the freshly minted killers stuff the victim’s body into a trunk in the living room and then prepare for a dinner party that they are hosting that very evening in that very living room. Gruesome? Yes, but it is a Hitchcock thriller after all.

Jimmy Stewart takes the role of one of the invited guests, Rupert Cadell. Cadell was the housemaster of the young men when they were at prep school and is now a publisher of philosophy. I won’t ruin it for you but Stewart plays it super sedate—quite a change from his usual higher energy offerings.

At first, he annoys you with his unsympathetic haughty manner, but you are quickly drawn into his exquisite cat and mouse game—a game that takes a severe turn when he is given the wrong hat at the end of the evening.

Joan Chandler also plays a guest and in making small talk with her friends she describes the books Cadell publishes as “Small print, big words, and no sales.” Little would the audience know that seventy years later big words are still treated as a mortal enemy.

As a geek, I find this sad. My aging eyes like the large print but if we trim our vocabulary selection down to the leanest cuts of meat, then we lose both our ability to effectively communicate and the sheer enjoyment of the centuries-old heritage of the English language.

Writing coaches encourage us to be direct and unadorned. If we use too many elevated words or ones with too many syllables then we are seen as the enemy of good writing and speaking.

Somewhere, of course, there is the right balance. On one side we have intellectuals like William F. Buckley. With his lizard tongue, bulging eyes, and constant aura of having taken a horse tranquilizer. He would lean so far back in his chair as to be horizontal as he found just the right word. Now that word might be lucubration or irredentist, but the right word it would be. I always bought Buckley’s word-a-day calendars and I admired him for the fun and exactitude he brought to our language. Apart from his now rather dated shtick, he was fighting a worthy fight. Here you can see him along with Christopher Hitchens and the shrew-like Emmett Tyrell (whom Hitch is, much to my enjoyment I must admit, absolutely verbally eviscerating): Buckley

When the pendulum swings the other way though it gets bleak. Here we have corporate directives instructing us to compose emails at the 6th-grade level, to watch how many syllables are in the words we use, and to think of limiting our vocabulary to about 1500 words. Most importantly, however, is to never, ever, force a reader to use the dictionary—even if “using the dictionary” means nothing more than a mouse click or tap to open up the dictionary app!

You know what happens then—we end up having to actually use more words as we dance around the prohibition of using the most fitting word just because it might be a tad too “big.”

A college friend of mine who is now a senior executive recently told me of the pushback from his staff when he used obsequious in an email. First, he had to tell them what it meant, but worse, he then had to deal with the fact that they would so readily complain to him, the supervisor and the author of the email, instead of first looking up the word…

Here I also take the elites gently to task. Often I have heard a person with a Masters or Ph.D. say “Oh, I had to look a few words up in the dictionary.” Seriously? These are men and women who pride themselves on having spent years in graduate school in which they, according to their narrative, lived in unheated apartments with no hot water, subsisted on a diet of Ramen noodles, and beavered away on their studies eighteen hours a day—and looking up a few words in the dictionary is an inconvenience? Shame on them!

Please completely ignore the politics in the link below. I only post it as it brings out a worry that I have with George Orwell—yes that George Orwell. The author of 1984, Animal Farm, and who resides on the Mount Olympus of the English language.

In a recent spat between Bill Bennett and the columnist and commentator George Will, Bennett takes Will to task for using the word oleaginous. Again, I know the politics is dynamite here, but that is not where I am going… Bennett

Now William Bennet holds both a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Texas and a law degree from Harvard so he knows darn well what oleaginous means and, if anything, I feel he should be commending George Will for raising our game. Bennett has made a career of being a national scold on all things education so he should be on Will’s side at least as vocabulary goes.

Bennett mentions, however, the superb admonition from George Orwell to never use a long word where a short one will do. Yet I wonder if Orwell’s fitting advice has led to the inadvertent consequence of swinging the pendulum too far away from the William F. Buckleys of this world and too close to those anodyne corporate directives that tell us to keep emails to the 6th-grade level.

I don’t mean to sound that I am championing big words just for their own sake—definitely not. In fact, the mere idea of a “big word” is so nebulous as to be meaningless. An anesthesiologist friend tells me that he had to learn about four thousand new words in medical school—many with Greek and Latin roots. So what sounds “big” to me might be a word he uses dozens of times a week. It is only “big” because I don’t know it—it all boils down to unfamiliarity. Just think how we made Google familiar and even flipped it from a noun into a verb.

Yet what bothers me about the modern “anti-big-word” attitude is that we not only lost the art of the language but important problem-solving tools as well—something that Orwell might not have fully anticipated. He was right in advocating clearness, exactitude, and efficiency, but at what cost?

The cost I fear is that we are squandering English as the incredible linguistic gift that it is—having been bequeathed to us from nearly one thousand years of history. This is sad as English is there to serve us. It has the capacity and ability to constantly draw in new words and phrases and immediately put them to work.

In fact, it is safe to say that English is one of history’s singularly most powerful tools. The good news for native-born British and U.S. speakers (just to name two) is that English has spilled its banks from being “owned” by any one country into a lingua franca for the world. This relieves us Brit and Yank citizens from being accused of a sort of linguistic nationalism.

How does the world use this? A good example is an executive for the airplane manufacturer Airbus Industries in France who will speak English with his customers no matter where they might be. Not that English is, or should be, the only game in town, but it is what works most often for him.

Nor would the Airbus exec or his customer ridicule someone for using “too big” of word. Instead, they would simply treat it as unfamiliar, learn it, and then use it in the future. We overlook how eager, even hungry, people are around the world to learn the language that we have been given from birth. They wonder why we waste it.

A more serious problem is that if we limit our vocabularies we limit our ability to solve problems. My counselor friends tell me that while word selection is not the only key in solving inter-personal problems, it is really important.

After all, how far can one get with a caveman “I good and you bad” level of word choice? Disclaimer: Of course a jerk can have a seriously big vocabulary and still be a first-class jerk.

The greatest reason though for expanding our vocabulary horizons is the variety and beauty that it injects into our lives. Artists, musicians, and great speakers and writers are always mixing and matching words. Just try to tell them that they have to stay in the prison of 1500 words! They know that words spice and season our lives so why would they want to serve up plain gruel day in and day out?

The French have a saying that the appetite comes with the eating and it is the same with words. If we listen for them the more we enjoy them—a virtuous circle if there ever were one!

Finally, nearly every red-blooded American male holds up Winston Churchill as a hero. Sure he had his share of failures, but he was history’s right man at the right time when danger was at the door.

Churchill was also, perhaps apart only from Shakespeare, the singular master of the English language when it came to getting a message across. He savored words as much as he did his whiskey and cigars and would often discuss them with his dinner guests. I ask you then…if you were his dinner guest would you tell Sir Winston not to use such “big words?” Would you tell him to limit his correspondences to words of few syllables or to limit his vocabulary to 1500 strong? No, of course, you would not and that is because Churchill used words as things of beauty and art to represent ideas. He had the perfect knack of turning the unfamiliar into the familiar.

Look at Churchill’s dictum that War is mainly a catalog of blunders. Now if we followed Orwell’s direction and run this through the “efficiency mill” this sentence might come out something like War is mainly a list of mistakes. Ok, same idea but most definitely not the same effect. This is where the art of word selection makes its difference. This is that moment when prose and poetry come within each other’s gravitational pull and the result is an elegant dance of words instead of a utilitarian signpost. Make it too simple and it gets boring pretty fast.

This was Churchill’s brilliance—he tore down all the barriers between long words and short ones, between big words and simple ones. He trafficked in ideas and words were his vehicle. For him, it was the idea that counts and words were the way to get them across. If we follow his example then all the distinctions between long and short words, big and simple ones, wonderfully fade away.

Of course, sometimes the effort to learn new words might not be worth it. Here I think of Jay Gatsby in what many view to be the great American novel The Great Gatsby. After Gatsby’s rather untimely demise his father, Mr. Gatz, relates to the narrator Nick Carraway the resolutions that Gatsby had made as a young man. Included in his list of self-betterment goals were “Read one improving book or magazine per week.” I admire this most excellent intent but sadly, because Gatsby’s heart could not let go of Daisy, he ended up getting shot in his swimming pool.

I think we are safe though. Most of us can enjoy words without the risk of meeting an unsavory end like Gatsby’s so enjoy the journey and most definitely stay average!