“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
–Jack Kerouac
If you're a scholar, lawyer, or aspiring pedant, you can skip this one. For the rest of you: avoid the temptation of ten-dollar words.
A ten-dollar word is one that helps the speaker sound smart and makes the listener feel confused: business jargon, academic terminology, or loanwords from ancient languages.
It doesn’t necessarily mean any word with more than three syllables. Something can be a mouthful without being mystifying. But ten-dollar words add complexity where none is required.
Let’s hunt for some ten-dollar words:
Securing contractors is a leveraged way to scale flexibly and reduce headcount costs
The point of this sentence is, presumably, “Contractors are cheaper and faster to hire than full-time employees.” But “leveraged,” “scale,” and “headcount” are fancy chrome used to make this sound Business Important.
Ten-dollar words can disconnect you from your fellow humans. Dropping a term like “sine qua non” in front of your friend Omar leads to three possibilities:
He knows what it means → They continue the conversation
He doesn't know what it means → They interrupt you to ask what it means
He doesn't know what it means → They say nothing and hope the answer will be revealed eventually
In two out of three cases, your partner needs help understanding you. And in one of those paths (2), he must interrupt you to acknowledge what they don’t know. This is hard for anyone.
Most troubling is the case (3) in which Omar says nothing.
Most folks’ll choose this say-nothing path because it’s easiest. But it pulls the listener out of focus, forcing them to scan the rest of the conversation for context clues about your Latin phrase of mystery.
We are already so alone in this world, why would you say anything to make you feel even less understood?
Avoid ten-dollar words. They cost you more and get you less.