"Ernest Hemingway: he has no courage, has never crawled out on a limb. He has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used."
Ernest Hemingway:
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use."
No. Look, I had some "fight" in these pages two days ago because somebody complained of my style.
It is the farthest from legitimate to suppose that one's intention is to impress - that is accusing people of childishness, and you need to have solid grounds to suppose that. There are higher chances that one wants to be _precise_.
That would be precision in the expression of some content, to have such expression match as perfectly as possible a defined structure of thoughts you elaborated. You may want to describe the facts precisely, and/or the mental processes that those facts provoke.
Also some image subtly (and not so subtly) emerged, days ago, of "language as a cage": but if you want to express exactly some "/that/", it is the language that will have to provide the means - as opposed to a horrifying idea of "expressing what language allows".
There are contexts in which it is of paramount importance that the reader understands the message (e.g. instructions) - pay attention towards using the most digestible expression then. But when you want your content to be expressed as the defined sculpture of structures of ideas, while many different expressions are possible they are pretty much "what they are, because they are what they should be".
I would have sworn that was from Elements of Style but apparently it's a Mark Twain quote.
For me, the gold standard of this is Carl Sagan writings. Beautiful ideas, explained in the clearest language possible.
Most people do not have time, nor desire to do additional intellectual work after slaving away doing whatever it is they do for income.
More precisely: not just having people less intellectually exercised¹, but also and especially creating some sort of "demand" that "things have to be simple". Non-recognition of complexity is also one of the cracks allowing populism. Your duty is to "spend one further thought", while some instances seem to defend an idea of an "as-if-constitutional right to reduced consideration".
(¹ I wrote the other day, «I also believe that "Now drop and give me twenty" will return us fitter personnel than "Please, be fed from a straw"»)
Expecting most of the English people to know obviate is pushing it, for someone using English as a second language it’s just adding complexity.
It’s about aiming where you expect the average reader to be.
Because you know the word don’t fall into the trap of assuming everyone else does.
Obviate has several cognates in romance languages, so it is straightforward.
Now, the phrasal verbs that are so obvious to a native speaker, these are the real head-scratchers.
Or street slang. It may sound like dumbing it down to you, but it actually adds complexity for a non-native.
"Register": I immediately know what it means and it takes tenths of a second for me to make the decision to click (or not to).
"Sign up": despite having a CEFR C2 level of English and using it at work every day, I still need to think for a few seconds if this is a registration or a login (cf. "sign in").
For a native speaker I suppose the latter is (marginally?) easier, but for a non-native, it's much harder, not even close.
“Create an account”
“Subscribe to mailing list”
“Submit contest entry”
It is one of the downsides of being a native speaker. I write pretty much like how I speak. It's hard to use it like a foreign language, but that's what technical international English feels like to me, in a way. In my experience, fluent second language learners master that style more easily than native speakers do.
”Comprehension” is not some audience-independent property of a text. Comprehension is what happens when a text is well-calibrated for an audience. If your audience is unlikely to know the word ”obviate” (which seems true of many engineering settings, where the audience is international), you absolutely improve comprehension by replacing it with words the audience is more likely to know.
I agree with you that ”obviate” sounds better, and in a setting like a blog post, monograph, or even an hn comment, that’s probably what I’d use. But in e.g. a work email for colleagues in another country, you reduce the risk of miscommunication by following OP’s suggestion.
There lies the spring coil. The less it is established what your audience is, the more you shift from "calibrated expression" to a form of expression which is as absolute and universal as possible. (See my previous post here, at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33045225 .) If you have a message for an audience, you will try and condition its expression according the audience; the more the audience is abstract, the more the expression will be unconditioned, as if intended for an ideal audience.
That said, there is of course a gray zone here.
Occurs to me there's another point in your favor as expressed in Orwell's version of a well-known passage from the Old Testament 'Ecclesiastes' into modern English. He makes the point brilliantly. Aesthetics does come into it!
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
I write obviate then I re-read and replace it with “removes the need to do $foo.
Some writers at work forget that the goal of the written word is to communicate to the reader not impress them with word salad.
I regard it the same as clever code (note: not the same as complex code) - written for the author not the reader.