Hifalutin seems like a word that an older person would use, doesn’t it? But the comment came from a middle aged person. She claimed that I was being ‘pretentious’ by using complex words when simple words would convey the meaning in a clearer manner. She was commenting on a report I had written for a project I was working on.
I felt, at the time, that she was being pompous for using the word pretentious, but I kept that to myself, she wrote the paychecks—she was ‘the Man’. The other thing is that she may have had a point. You see, I’ve been accused of that very crime before, several times, in fact. The first was early on in my writing career, during the adventures of Dick and Jane. Mrs. Roper hit upon the idea of teaching us to read and write at the same time. We would read ‘See Jane run’ and then write the sentence on our big chief tablets.
I found that to be a tedious exercise at best and hit upon a profound idea that would serve important purposes, to demonstrate my superior vocabulary skills and impress Mary Jean Larson.
During hide and seek someone taught me how to spell Mississippi. We counted—one Mississippi, two Mississippi etc, to give time for proper hiding. What a glorious feeling to be the master of such an impressive word, eleven letters long but only 4 letters to memorize. And the sequence fairly melted off my tongue, like candy at Christmas—M i ss i ss i pp i.
Being the owner of such an impressive word, I had to incorporate it into the lesson, so I logically added it to the end of the sentence, ‘See Jane run in Mississippi.’ Now a word such as that requires careful crafting and I fell behind in the excursion. It seems that Dick and Jane had added Spot to the group and they had crested a hill and were starting back down while I had barely gotten Jane into the run, let alone brought her along into Mississippi. So I was well behind in the lesson but assumed the magnificence of such a word would carry the day for me. Mrs. Roper conducted her inspection, arrived at my desk and snatched up that paper and gave out a low groan that sounded like a goat bleating.
I’m here to tell you, my chest swole up with pride, because I had hit on such an impressive word that not even the teacher knew what it meant. I tried to explain that it was a word used in hide and seek, but she was already at Mary Jean’s desk holding her paper up as an example of excellence in all things writing. She threw my paper on her desk and demanded a debriefing after the bell rang.
Later, I discovered the Thesaurus, I was in heaven. While Mississippi was the pretentious foundation of my hifalutin faults, the Thesaurus was the cement that bonded it. My college papers were filled with brilliant words and phrases and even references to obscure dialects that I had no idea what meant, but seemed to fit the context of what I was writing. After all, I had read Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake and James Joyce was easily quoted even if the meaning of what he wrote was obscure to everyone but him, because he spoke Italian pretty well. I wish I could remember the paper I wrote that prompted my creative literature professor to scrawl across the top: “Cosa diavolo significa questo?”
I stopped by his office and said, “I’m sorry professor but I can’t figure out what this means.” He said, “That’s alright I haven’t understood a damn thing you’ve written all semester.” He delivered this short soliloquy with his face buried in his desk and dismissed me with a wave of his hand. It was a cold and bitter day in Boulder as I trudged through the snow to the language lab where a graduate student told me it was Italian and it read, ‘What the hell does this even mean?’
I try, Lord knows I do, but obviously I slip now and again with a hifalutin word creeping in to spoil an otherwise coherent piece of work. I don’t know if there is much of a message here beyond, keep it simple, say what you mean and give the reader a break don’t make them find a Thesaurus. One sure test is that if you’re trying to impress Mary Jean Larson with your vocabulary skills, you should probably pick a different word.
Henry E. Peavler