The seasoning of latinate words

A quick thought, engendered as I finished making dinner a few nights ago. I found a George Orwell quote a while ago, which likened formal, Latinate words to a 'soft snow'... "A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. ". Rob Waller mentioned it on his blog at http://www.robwaller.org/blog/2006/12/soft-snow-of-latin-words_21.html

My idle thought as I polished up my pasta: are formalisms always there to blur? Aren't they sometimes a soft snow of Parmesan? A little seasoning, overwhelming in great quantity, and capable of ruining the entire experience, but also critical? As a delicate embellishment, they add a little savour to a plain dish. And we all know that readers will take more effort with text they find interesting. Do our mouthfilling syllables sometimes make texty text more tasty, a heartier dish?

I've spent many oodles of time removing Latinate words from texts, as all good plain Englishers should. But now that I'm a freelancer rather than a paid stooge, perhaps I can question some of the abiding commandments of plain English. So I can come clean: I've spent many hours trying to decode fiddly formalisms while thinking simmeringly that we're causing more problems by removing a familiar word or concept. Take 'substitution'. Nasty pointless Latinism, my instincts say, and a nominalisation to boot. I change it to 'change' with the barest thought. But is it really so hard? It turns up in every soccer game on every Saturday. It's a familiar concept, if not a familiar wordshape. It's not hard.

I've fought with clients to strip out 'deduction' while knowing that the people I'm writing to will (unfortunately) have seen plenty of them. I've battled with 'making an application' when the document we're working on is an application. And yes, it would be simpler as 'apply'. But sometimes, when you've danced around 'the form that came with this pack', you know - you absolutely know - that anyone who has a problem with understanding 'the enclosed form' is probably going to have more problems with the whole form-filling task than just finding the form.

Anathema and heresy. And yes I will have these battles for simplicity with clients again, and fight just as strongly to remove the -ations and -utions. Because it's hard enough convincing people that removing formalisms is worthwhile without diluting the message with exceptions. But sometimes, just sometimes, perhaps a sprinkling of Parmesan doesn't do that much harm.