In my writing and teaching, I’ve come to understand the value of the word “diction” in solving some of my most important language problems. It comes from the Latin word for “oratory” and “speech” and belongs to a cluster of words from the same root, including “dictionary,” “dictum,” “dictation” and even “dictator.” Imagine taking dictation from a dictator!
If you have good diction, it means that you enunciate words clearly, the way Brian Williams does as NBC news anchor, or the way jazz singer Diana Krall performs “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
But that is not the primary definition. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “diction” as “the choice and use of words in speech or writing.” The key word is “choice.” In most cases, writers choose words that fit their topic and appeal to their audience. You will choose a different set of words if you write for “Reader’s Digest” than if you write for “Playboy.” The language of a blogger will differ if that writer is choosing words for a blog on politics, or sports or parenting. The grave T.S. Eliot used a different poetic diction from that of the sprightly Ogden Nash.
Let’s use two very different tabloid newspaper stories as examples. On the day I wrote this article, a very good newspaper, the Rocky Mountain News, published its final edition. On the front page was an unsigned editorial titled “Goodbye, Colorado.” The tone is sad, poignant, nostalgic, marking the end of an era:
Here we see a perfect match between language and purpose, words you might use in a powerful piece of oratory: “worth telling,” “striving,” “special place,” “from generation to generation,” “virtues of its settlers,” “build on their dreams.”
Compare that diction to this language in the New York Post, a story about mobsters and murder:
I love every word of this lead, written by a reporter, Kati Cornell, who has mastered the lingo of underworld overlords. The cheap rhyme “gal pal” and alliteration “Dapper Don” send the sentence over the top, but it is the diction, including words like “sicced,” “sadistic” and “smacking around,” that match language to the topic and to audience expectation.
I wrote an essay about the abuse of the word “crusade” in which I referred to Osama Bin Laden as “that spelunking meshuggeneh.” That diction surprised some readers who wondered whether it was appropriate to my topic and available to readers. I confess that I still loved the phrase and hope that such self-love is not literary onanism, but an essential form of self-respect, a writerly requirement. You can’t please others if you fail to please yourself.
I could have, for example, simplified my jelly donut phrase to “that cave-dwelling madman.” Not a single reader would be confused. But “cave-dwelling” seemed too soft and “madman” too common. “Spelunking” is one of my favorite words, and I rarely miss a chance to use it. Derived from the Greek and Latin word for “cave,” a spelunker “explores caves as a hobby.” The word, I believe, reduces Bin Laden, makes his circumstances more claustrophobic, and adds that wicked middle syllable “lunk,” which just reminds me of “lunk head.”
Even better, for me, was “meshuggeneh,” a great Yiddish word that I’ve heard since I was a child in New York City, meaning “a crazy person,” but in a Mel Brooks rather than a Sigmund Freud kind of way. It may be the most unlikely word ever to abut “spelunking,” and it exacts, as a Jewish epithet, poetic justice against one of the evil leaders who would just as soon wipe a certain group of people from the face of the earth.
I cannot ignore the tests of comprehensibility. I’ve often said that writers have a duty to readers to define strange words or make them clear from context. I may be self-indulgent, but I’m not naïve. I can’t envision a caravan of readers marching to the dictionary to get my diction (like my earlier use of the word onanism). I guess it’s fair to say that I’m willing to sacrifice those readers to give others a blast of delight, including the one who told me that, upon meeting the phrase, she “giggled with glee.”
One of my favorite authors is Olivia Judson, who writes funny books about sex and evolutionary biology. I first encountered her work in an issue of Seed magazine where I was attracted to the irresistible headline: “Super Sex Me.” It began:
“Her mate is minuscule: The green spoon worm has one of the most extreme size differences known to exist between male and female, the male being 200,000 times smaller than his mate. Her lifespan is a couple of years. His is only a couple of months – and he spends his short life inside her reproductive tract, regurgitating sperm through his mouth to fertilize her eggs. More ignominious still, when he was first discovered, he was thought to be a nasty parasitic infestation.”
Like a skillful song writer, Judson matches her diction to her purpose, which is to make science writing accessible to the general reading public. Here’s how she does it:
- She is not afraid to use technical language or Latin names, but follows the Latin classification with four words of one syllable: the green spoon worm.
- She uses round number instead of specific numbers to describe size difference, and it’s a beauty: 200,000. A couple of times she even uses the very unscientific phrase “a couple of … “
- She writes with a quirky human voice, using terms such as “my all-time favorite” to describe this organism. What kind of woman has an all-time favorite organism and is an expert on its sex life? My kind.
- She gives these creatures human qualities, a strategy that attracts us to them. The female is a sedentary lady. She lives in a neighborhood.
- Throughout her essay, she plays with the miniaturized male to remind us of the contemporary status issues of men and women.
- She chooses a hot spot in her story — the end of the second paragraph — to place her sharpest phrase, “nasty parasitic infestation.”
That is a lot of great work from a couple of paragraphs, all derived from her diction, her choice of words to match her topic, her intent and her audience.
