I'm with you on that point. My favorite quote by Mark Twain has always been, "Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do."
I always liked Twain’s line about lightning versus lightning-bug, though it was a reworked quote from Josh Billings (which Twain acknowledged).
Mark Twain fully deserves the reputation he has acquired in our culture!
That is so true about those “five dollar words”. Heh, I remember back in the Navy, I was a lowly enlisted guy with a decent vocabulary and ability to use it. But to some, I no doubt sounded like some egghead trying to impress people.
We had a Chief who had unofficial control of assigning nicknames to people. I think he was from Mississippi, and his name was Waters. (He always had a huge cheek-full of Red Man, and a styrofoam cup to spit into, so his name given by others became “Chief Muddy Waters”!)
He would name one guy “WingNut”, another guy “Stinky”, and someone else “The Preacher”, a guy of Korean descent “Bruce Lee” due to his advanced Tai Kwan Do abilities. He called me “The Professor”...I didn’t like it, but I determined it was good-naturedly given and used, so it apparently wasn’t meant to be disrespectful from him, but it didn’t stick, and everyone just called me “RL”.
Something about that quote reminded me of a famous quote by Herb Brooks that I always loved, when dressing down a player on the Olympic Hockey Team in 1980 said to him: “You’ve got a million dollar set of legs and a ten-cent fart for a brain.”
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will suffice.