Lincoln, Mark Twain & Lightning: Choice Words On Word Choice by Ernest W. Nicastro

"Eighty-seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation...."

The Gettysburg Address

Chances
are your reaction to the above "quote" is something along the lines of,
"No, no, no! You're wrong, wrong, wrong!" And, of course, you would be
right. Because Lincoln was not only a great leader, he was a great
writer. So instead of beginning his Gettysburg Address with a cold,
lifeless number, he opens on a prayerful note with a turn of phrase
adapted from the 90th Psalm of the King James Bible: "Four score and
seven."

Clearly, Lincoln knew the difference between the almost right word
- and, the RIGHT word. A distinction famously defined by Mark Twain
some 25 years later as..."the difference between the lightning bug and
the lightning." With that thought in mind, in today's article I'm going
to offer you a few choice words on word choice to help you get more of
the right words into your communications. And, make your writing more effective.

Let's start by looking at the sports section of my local daily, The Columbus Dispatch.
In a recent story, AP reporter Tim Reynolds describes Dick Vitale's
reaction to being voted into the Basketball Hall-of-Fame. Vitale,
writes Reynolds, "admitted he 'cried like a baby' upon learning he was
induced."

Now maybe Vitale's use of the word baby clouded the writer's thinking. Because induced is so NOT the right word choice.

Which leads us to today's big (but hardly revolutionary) idea:

For more effective word choice think harder about the words you choose.

For example, while it's obvious that Mr. Reynolds made the wrong choice, what about the people who penned these lines?

• This is literally the equivalent of Microsoft coming to your house and locking a CD in your car CD player.
• More CIOs are disinterested in Linux
• Given the enormity of the job, it's no wonder the men who built the railroad seem like giants to some of us today.
• WasteWise has collected the following environmental factoids to help you understand the impacts of waste prevention and recycling. (From the web site of the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency)

How
many of these people made the wrong word choice? How many made the
right choice? Actually, those are trick questions. Because in each
instance the highlighted word is used incorrectly. Yes, you may have
read or heard a word used a certain way - even in a prestigious
publication, by a noted expert or on a federal government agency web
site. But that doesn't mean the word was used correctly.

As to why the above words are - in Mark Twain's manner of speaking, lightning bugs - I'll go over one of them: factoid.

According to Webster's a factoid is -

"something
fictitious or unsubstantiated that is presented as fact, devised
especially to gain publicity and accepted because of constant
repetition."

Therefore WasteWise is actually telling us
they have fictitious or unsubstantiated information to help us
"understand the impacts of waste prevention and recycling." The writer
could have prevented this mistake with a little more thought and a
quick trip to an online dictionary. Which is what I trust you'll do if
it's unclear to you why the other examples are incorrect.

Now for a couple of specific word choice tips: