Using big words

I was recently told to get a new job, in preference to being told to get a life, on facebook for using a big word (not in an actual status, just in response to a comment, with no intention of being "pretentious" - but it was all loving jokes and I'm not really offended). However, I am a believer in using more precise language where it is available, even if it involves the use of a longer and less common word (usually to save the use of three or four smaller ones). So, I was rather fortified to re-read this quote in that introduction to The Death of Adam, by Marilynne Robinson:

... In this culture, we do depend heavily on the universities to teach us what we need to know, and also to sustain and advance knowledge for the purposes of society as a whole. Surely it was never intended that the universities should do the thinking, or the knowing, for the rest of us. Yet this seems to be the view that prevails now, inside and outside the academy.

I do not wish to imply that the universities constitute an elite, as they are often said to do. On the contrary. A politician who uses a word that suggests he has been to college or assumes anyone in his audience has read a book is ridiculed in the press not only for pretentiousness but for, in effect, speaking gibberish. Many editors are certain that readers will be alarmed and offended by words that hint at the most ordinary learning, and so they exercise a kind of censorship which is not less relentless or constraining for being mindless. Language which suggests learning is tainted, the way slang and profanity once were. Rather than shocking, it irks, or intimidates, supposedly. It is not the kind of speech anyone would think to free because it is considered a language of pretension or asserted advantage. People writing in this country in the last century used a much larger vocabulary than we do, though many fewer of them and their readers were educated. I think it is the association of a wide vocabulary with education which has, in our recent past, forbidden the use of one. In other words, the universities now occupy the places despised classes held in other times and cultures in that they render language associated with them unfit for general use.