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The last days of long words! The sunset of syntactical surplusage!

In Chicago, in a downtown courtroom, lawyer Edward Greenspan won't let Conrad Black take the stand.

The problem is Mr. Black's fondness for whacking big words: tricoteuses (knitters of yarn, used to describe reporters and gossips, augmented by the adjective "braying"), planturous(fleshy), poltroon (a coward, a.k.a. former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa), spavined (lame), dubiety (doubt: Mr. Black rarely uses a simple word where a splashy lemma will do), gasconading (blustering) and velleities (distant hopes), to list just a few of his verbal smatterings. Mr. Greenspan fears the Lord's lingualism will turn off the jury.

Meanwhile in Toronto, at the Ryerson School of Journalism, Ivor Shapiro is teaching his class to write clearly. The decor is Early Modern Factory — flat window, false ceiling of black metal grille to make the room seem less cavernous, giant TV suspended in a corner like a moody spider.

"One has to tell students in journalism school to express themselves simply, because they have been taught in high school to use big words in an effort to impress their professors," Mr. Shapiro says.

To do this, he has handed out a story called "Dead Reckoning," by journalist Veronica Cusack, an account of an autopsy performed on a 17-year-old boy who committed suicide. The students — and this happens every time, without exception — object to the last paragraph, in which the writer employs the word quiddity.

"'Why would she use a big word when she could use "essence?" ' they ask," Mr. Shapiro says. "So there is something about a $10 word that calls out to them. I feel, myself, really caught. If she makes you go and use a dictionary because you didn't know the word, is that really so terrible a thing?"

These days, apparently, it is. A number of people are getting alarmed. And this isn't just a minor trend, or a sentimental longing for long-worded days of yore. It turns out that having a good vocabulary is shatteringly important.

It's fairly easy to teach our little geniuses to read. But how well they understand, and how much they learn for the rest of their lives, depends directly on how many words they acquire before they turn 18.

Which is a gargantuan (adj. enormous, gigantic) problem. "While North American teachers have become more effective at teaching students to read words, we have virtually ignored the impact of teaching students to understand words, especially in the primary grades," is the conclusion reached in a new and frighteningly comprehensive study by Andrew Biemiller, a professor at the University of Toronto.

This is the revenge of the Flashcard parents. If Little Princess is an average child, she'll know 6,000 root-word meanings by the end of Grade 2. That's okay, but nothing special: At that point, the top 25 per cent of children already know twice as many words as the lowest 25 per cent, and the gap grows exponentially. Roughly 35,000 more words get stuffed into Little Princess's average head by the time she leaves high school.

But by then the foundation of her so-called mind has hardened. Limited by early lexical laxity, the average North American adult knows only 30,000 to 60,000 words, out of a potential "working vocabulary" of 700,000. If only Little Princess had learned more words earlier! If only you were a better parent!

Children who live in "advantaged" homes — where new words are considered important and bandied about — hear three times as many words as kids who don't. And those who don't are at "considerable risk of continued low achievement," Prof. Biemiller says.

You don't need a vocabulary to see the point: A home, a city or a society where people appreciate and share their vocabularies, where they take public pleasure in using language, is a place with a future where the lights are on.

No longer put to the test

Unfortunately, the trend across society is in the exact opposite direction. Debate and confusion over the value of having a vocabulary have even infected international politics. Last spring, Gilles de Robien, France's Education Minister, declared that schools in suburban Paris would teach more grammar and vocabulary to integrate immigrants and prevent future riots. The British Minister of State for Schools, Jim Knight, immediately called this Frenchie rot. He insisted that grammar and vocabulary are elitist, and therefore are what cause youth riots.

In the U.S., the Educational Testing Service has spent the past decade snipping vocabulary-specific bits and pieces off the Scholastic Aptitude Test (the SAT), its famous college-entrance exam. Jonathan Arak, a tutor and trainer for the Princeton Review, a company that preps students for such exams, maintains that 40 per cent of American colleges pay little or no attention to sections of the test that emphasize vocabulary. (Then again, 730 colleges use no entrance test at all.) The ETS in turn takes its orders from the College Board, the organization of U.S. colleges and secondary schools that has overseen university admission since 1900.

In 1994, the ETS dropped its antonym test, in which prospective students had to pick the opposite of a given word from a list of choices. The even subtler analogy test (collar is to dog as yoke is to _____) was next to go, in 2005. The latest SAT is longer, emphasizes more math and relies on essays and sentence completion tasks instead.

"The last two changes have de-emphasized vocabulary," Mr. Arak admits. "I would guess it's to even the playing field for students who have English as a second language."

Completing a sentence with a word from a list is easier because the sentence provides context. Mr. Arak, who is 42, openly admits that the verbal comprehension of students he has today is no match for that of kids he taught 19 years ago. He blames a generation of baby-boom educators and a school system that began to fail when he was a student.

"I didn't have weekly vocabulary quizzes," he admits. "I never took grammar."

No wonder a small industry has popped up to serve holdouts who still believe it's important to learn new words. Last March, during "Win With Words Week," the GSN Corporation and Princeton Review sponsored the first televised National Vocabulary Contest. High-school students across the country competed for $40,000 in prizes.

Harriet Brand, director of public relations for Princeton Review, thinks the National Vocabulary Contest might eventually wipe the National Spelling Bee off the blackboard.

"The reality is," Ms. Brand insists, "God gave us spell-check. And what is spelling? It's about precocious kids, most of whom are home-schooled. A vocabulary competition, on the other hand, is just very different and special. It's literally going to improve their lives. So it's a much more practical skill than a spelling bee."

The Hit Parade of the top 50 words on the SAT, another popular vocab builder, is no breeze: It includes easy passes ƒo

such as exculpate (to free from blame or guilt) but also yataghan, a guardless sword used in Muslim countries. It does not include yegg (a travelling burglar or safecracker) or yapp (a form of bookbinding), words your correspondent found while he was looking up yataghan.

But the new vocabulary products have a touching, desperate feel.

The Vocab Minute, another online offering from the Princeton Review, teaches vocabulary in one-minute musical ditties. Sample: I've got street cred/ Because I mean what I say/ Folks on my street/ Believe the words I convey/ I've got street cred/ Because I do not deceive/ Cred comes from Latin/ It means believe. Still, within six months of the release of the podcasts, 10,000 subscribers had signed up.

The word warriors

Where the argument over the importance of big words is now set to rage anew, however, is in universities across North America, in the Next Great Battle between the linguists and the logophiles.

The linguists, who have the upper hand at the moment, are very much of a type. They tend to be acolytes of American scholar William Labov, who developed the concept of code-switching. Standard vocabulary doesn't need to be taught, the Labovites claim, because there's no such thing as a standard vocabulary.

"I think that the status of one's vocabulary varies with the context," says Duke University's Cathy Davidson, a professor of English and a Labovite herself. "What linguists call 'code switching' is more prevalent than ever. And that's typically where you're moving from one economic level to another: You practise one vernacular in the 'hood and then, if you're a lawyer, say, you switch."

One Labovates oneself up or down the social ladder by mastering a new vocabulary at each rung. In the old days, this was a straightforward trick of learning the language of the establishment.

Senator Nancy Ruth, whose own stock of fancy words has a reputation on Parliament Hill, "grew up with a father who wanted to make it in the world." Every morning, Harry Jackman tore a page out of a two-inch-thick Pocket Oxford Dictionary. Then he stuck it to his shaving mirror. He memorized every word on the page as he scraped, and used each one in a sentence that day. He went on to found Empire Life, create the Jackman family fortune and serve as an MP.

But that was before television, technology and immigration fractured the very idea of a standard vocabulary and a standard establishment. These days, students in public schools in cities such as Toronto and Los Angeles hail from at least 50 different language groups. Prime-time TV has its own specialized (and simplified) vocabulary, as do pop culture and cellphones and the Internet. Teaching a standard vocabulary today isn't just ineffective: According to the linguists, it's undemocratic and limiting.

Some of the most militant linguists are Canadian. Clive Beck, a professor of education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, relishes the collapse of the standard Western vocabulary. "I think it's partly a democratization, of getting teachers to have a closer relationship with their students, and being able to talk on the same level. I love correctness in speech and in writing. But I think to some extent I have to go with the change."

Betwixt, for instance, "is just an old-fashioned word. So you shouldn't use it. Nefarious, people don't understand it, so don't use it. I think it does put a distance between you and especially young people if you use an old-fashioned word. True, some people like to be old-fashioned. But I think the world is changing so rapidly that we should change with it. So if you don't explain what it means, you waste people's time."

And the pleasure, the actual fun of knowing and using and privately sharing a word like, say, sciagraphy?

"My advice to people is to get pleasure out of explaining things clearly. You have to give up things you love. But then you can have a really great connection with people."

Zig, zag and zeugma

For a clan that believes in words for the masses, however, the linguists can be an abstruse lot. The most recent issue of the International Journal of Lexicography, the go-to tome for learned language leaders, features an article with the title "Linguistic Lightbulb Moments: Zeugma in Idioms."

Now, for a mere logophile, someone who loves words for their own sake, however useless, a title like that is figuratively (adj. metaphorically, not literally) orgasmic. He doesn't read the article, because who can? Instead, he bolts down the rabbit hole of the dictionary for a half-hour of gorgeous, cozy burrowing. A zeugma, it turns out — and believe me, this article would have been published a lot sooner without these distractions — is a figure of speech, a rhetorical device that describes the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a common verb or noun.

But — it goes without saying — there are varieties of zeugma. The prozeugma puts the verb at the beginning: "She conquered shame with passion, fear with audacity, reason with madness." A hypozeugma puts the verb at the end: "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears." The opposite of a zeugma is an hypozeuxis, wherein each subject has its own verb — a famous Churchillian device ("We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds," etc.) but also favoured by Star Wars' Yoda ("Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.")

There is, of course, zero value in this ort of knowledge, this zany word zeugma. The likelihood of ever needing it is teensy-weensy. But the logophile, the word nerd, lives in hope: One day zeugma will come in handy, will be amusing or apt, and then the world will feel a little more cohesive and the logophile will experience the secret ecstasy that logophiles live for — the sensation that they are part of one big mind. Strange words are the exotic spices of a logophile's brain.

And hey, zeugma actually works nicely as a metaphor: Her walk was zeugmatic, her entire body driven by the common engine of her mouth. If you were sufficiently cool, you could even use it as a greeting, a replacement for hello: "Zeugma! How's it hanging?" The answer would be pro, hypo, or meso for in-between.

But not for the contemporary anti-vocabulary linguist, who values a word only in terms of its usefulness to a target audience. The empress of the linguists in Canada is Katherine Barber, the editor of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, where she has overseen the classification of Canadian English for 15 years.

She must have done something right. The Canadian Oxford has sold more than 200,000 copies since 1988. The most recent edition added 5,000 words, or new senses of old words. Bling is there, and brachytherapy (a form of cancer radiotherapy where a radioactive source is implanted next to a tumour), "or the new sense of cougar, of older women chasing after younger men."

Fewer words were axed than added: Struthious, of or pertaining to ostriches, is, alas, a goner. Mistress Barber and her fellow lexicographers let a word marinate for five years before it gets the nod to be in the dictionary. "You just have to make a decision for your users, on whether they're going to run across it or not."

But is that what a dictionary is for — to teach you words you are likely to run across? Or should a dictionary be a Galapagon sanctuary, precisely where you can find the words you never run across — the way the Arctic is a place Canadians seldom visit, but are always grateful to be able to imagine?

Practically, as Ms. Barber says, most dictionaries have to do the former. The one exception is the lexical father of us all, the multi-volume Complete Oxford English Dictionary, "the engine of all others in the English language."

Ms. Barber and her fellow editors consult new databases and sources incessantly, highlighting words for possible inclusion in their next edition. They store these catchwords in what's formally called a citation file, but which around the office they refer to as "incomings." ("I guess you could call our dictionary the outgoings.") There are, to date, 75 million English words in incomings worldwide: In Canada, since 1992, exactly 142,391 words have been catchworded.

This very morning, in fact, Ms. Barber is sitting in her office in leafy Don Mills, a suburb of Toronto, perusing a clutch of magazines: Style at Home, Wish, Pharmacy Practise and that exemplar of linguistic usage, the Canadian Tire catalogue. She has already highlighted outdoor rooms (the new trend in patio decor), the verb uplight (something one can do to trees, or one's face at Halloween), beadboard panelling, Euro pillows (26 inches square) and a species of pepper. ("We have lots of peppers already in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, but we don't have pepperoncini.")

Her approach to unusual words is functional, not whimsical. "I don't know if people are consciously interested in developing their vocabulary," she says. "They do it as a matter of course. If you're a curler, you have a vocabulary that reflects curling."

More to the point, "We lexicographers just feel there are too damn many words in the language," Ms. Barber says — understandably, since she's the one who has to dust them off. She wants to keep the housekeeping manageable, which is why "you need different dictionaries for different purposes. The worst thing you can do in the company of a lexicographer is to say, 'Look in the dictionary' — because what you should be saying is, 'Look in a dictionary.' "

So it's no surprise that the Oxford editrix scoffs at Eric Korn, the English bibliophile and antiquarian bookseller who claims the best snap test of a dictionary is to see how it treats the word pavlova, the delicious dessert devised to honour Russian dancer Anna Pavlova when she toured Australia and New Zealand in the 1920s.

A fragment of Korn's test: Turn to the entry for this antipodean confection, a muscular structure of meringue and fruit with a tutu of whipped cream, and see whether your favourite lexicon tells you the dates of Madame Pavlova's visits Down Under. Observe whether it favours New Zealand or Australia as the origin; ¡K a dictionary with unlimited space would discuss the rival claims of Henry Sachse (Perth, 1935) and Davis Dainty Dishes (Davis Gelatine Co., NZ, 1927) together with the outsider claim of Dr Pavlov, a tribute to the specialist in mouth-wateringness. ¡K And at the very least let it not omit "pav" (Aust. informal).

Now that is a man who loves words, and wants us to love them with him. He's not showing off; he's excited, on a glandular level. Usefulness never even enters his gigantic mind.

That doesn't persuade Ms. Barber to dish up more pavlova in her Canadian dictionary, even though she makes a mean one herself. "The first thing," she says (and you can hear her looking the word up online, building an argument against it), "is that it's an Australian or New Zealand dessert that you might not be eating here."

But even a progressive linguist of Ms. Barber's distinction has her dark moments these days, when it sometimes seems no word is too short or too simple. Not long ago, as a volunteer tour guide at the National Ballet's glassy new palace in downtown Toronto, she referred to a tutu as "beautifully iridescent." Afterward, a man in the crowd, accompanied by his young daughter, took Ms. Barber aside. "Please don't do that," he said. Iridescent was too big a word for his little girl.

"I felt rather crushed," Ms. Barber says. She has the same sinking feeling when people object to the language of Conrad Black, the Lord of Logomachy. "Because I thought, geez, they're not all that far-fetched. What's wrong with your vocabulary? It makes you wonder if there is a paucity of vocabulary out there."

'I really do despair'

The logophiles, meanwhile, are merely waiting. They know this battle — between those who believe words should be useful and those who believe they should be beautiful too — is age-old, and stretches back to what even Cathy Davidson calls "grumpy ancient Roman orators."

Thomas Delworth, a senior ambassador in Canada's foreign service in Germany, Sweden, Hungary and Indonesia, and a former provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, is a classic of the type.

Verbal precision matters to diplomats, even when they have to be intentionally imprecise. Mr. Delworth is the kind of guy who, when you ask how many dictionaries he owns, says, "You mean just the ones in English?" and means it unpretentiously.

"I really do despair, as an old man, about the fate of the language," he says. "It has become very vulgarized."

In his first week as the provost of Trinity College in 1996, he was astonished by the number of times and the number of ways the F-word rang out across the quadrangle of the college, as verb and noun and gerund and injunction and expletive, as insult and compliment. He objected, publicly.

"It's simply inconsistent with the purpose of the college," he says. "The use of the mind, I mean. Life is life, of course. But I don't fool myself into thinking that my indignation will change anything permanently."

He blames the cheesy easiness of e-mail for the barren state of our word cupboards. He also blames the linguists, "who believe all is flux and change. I think that's just absurd. How can a dictionary be anything other than normative? What's it for? A word is as it has been used by educated people to convey an idea. Although I realize I must sound like something out of Noah's Ark."

Robert Brustein, the playwright, critic and founding director of the American Repertory Theatre, who also teaches English at Harvard, sees such damage everywhere.

"I have found a deterioration in the capacity of students to use language," Mr. Brustein says. "Just the papers I get require more work on my part. Imprecise writing. There's a laziness too. A kind of disconnect between the mind and the words.

"So the capacity to articulate what's in your mind has declined. I just think" — even though more people attend school for longer than ever — "that people are not as well educated as they once were. We teach them not how to swim, but how to get along in the pool. We teach social and political things well enough. But we still don't know how to read and count."

Why bother to go fancy when plain would suffice? Because you can. Veronica Cusack, who wrote the article that Ryerson students love to hate, fished out quiddity "because it was so unbearably sad — a 17- or 18-year-old man, and who he was had been obliterated by stepping off a 20-storey balcony. And who was he? And what was he? And there was something about that word that said it." Something ancient, as timeless as the end of life. Quiddity is an old word from medieval Latin, from the root quid, "what." She was describing the what of the boy.

And the junior journalists who are upset that she used a word they didn't know? "I don't think there is really anything wrong with expecting a reader to go to a dictionary," Ms. Cusack says, "though not in the Conrad Black sense, where you have to use it four times in a sentence. There are people who tell me they don't understand some of the words I use. But probably, being a total snob, I just think, 'Well, that's your problem.' "

Ms. Cusack is not alone. Wordsmith.org, probably the best-known word website, regularly reaches 600,000 logophiles in 200 countries. Nor is enthusiasm for vocabulary limited to aging octos and professors who feel left behind.

Will Sheff, the lead singer and songwriter for the Austin, Tex., band Okkervil River, claims to be offended when his band is described as literary and bookish — "as if pop music is ennobled when it has some kind of literary aspirations," he recently told the magazine The Believer. But Mr. Sheff also wrote So Come Back, I Am Waiting, a song, by his own description, "with all these big words in it": Killing softly and serial/ He lifts his head, horned, handsome, magisterial/ He's the smell of the moonlight wysteria/ He's the thrill of the abecedarian.

Mr. Sheff said he was being ironic. "I would hope that people don't think that the big words are what makes the song good. The big words are my attempt to be pretentious in a way that's hopefully, maybe, wry? 'Oh, my God, can I really get away with this?' "

But Mr. Sheff is a logophile, make no mistake. To be serious about language, and all it can do — which is anything — means playing its game, taking pleasure in it.

Vivian Rakoff, chairman emeritus of the department of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, and one of the more articulate human beings on the planet, believes our resistance to big words is part of a bigger crankiness — "the suspicion of smart people, the well-rehearsed criticism of the Churchillian stance, that you shouldn't appear to be smart. One of the worst insults we have is that someone is too clever by half, because it means you like to be wily. There is a general suspicion of the man of many words. It's ancient, but it's still there."

Shakespeare knew that. His most courageous characters, the advisers and soldiers who dare to tell their lords the truth, are all plain speakers: Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, who tells Antony he's making a complete idiot of himself with feckless Cleopatra; Cordelia in Lear.

But Shakespeare loved all words, so he used the big ones too, to make constant fun of vain, loquacious man — the old Spanish windbag Don Armado in Love's Labour's Lost, or Osric in Hamlet, that brainless, yacky lapwing who to Hamlet represents all that is wrong with his dressy, doting age. But Hamlet isn't exactly a crystal of clarity himself, most of the time: He swims through his own verbiage, spewing words and spawning thoughts, until he arrives, full stop, at clarity. When he stops speaking, he dies. The rest is silence.

'Scintillate, scintillate'

The truth is that we mistrust and love long words at the same time, drawn to simplicity, longing for complication. The dilemma is built into the English language itself — its Germanic roots short and feisty, its Latinate legs longer and knotted, veined with "skeins of verbosity." (Dr. Rakoff illustrates the difference by reciting the Latinate version of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: "Scintillate, scintillate, globule vivivic/ Would I could fathom thy matter specific/ Lustily proud in the ether capacious/ Strongly resembling a gem carbonaceous.")

At times a culture or a profession or a mind gets stuck in one river or the other; sometimes we take them on as national traits. "It was striking when I came to Canada," Dr. Rakoff says. "I didn't learn it enough, but there is general value placed here on shutting up."

The Irish (novels), the Italians (opera), the Germans (philosophy), the English (more lyric poetry than any culture on earth) are more famously blabbermouthed: They can't stop words spilling from their lips because they can't shut off their brains. "The more words you have," Dr. Rackoff says, "the more ideas you have."

Conrad Black may be so verbose as to have given big words a bad name, and he may or may not be guilty of some legal malfeasance, but what we notice, and are wary of, and can't help listening to night after night on the news, is the way his mind keeps shouting out through his vocabulary.

"There may be two Blacks," Dr. Rakoff speculates. "There's obviously the businessman. And then there's the other guy, who is genuinely excited by history and by words and by facts. Oddly, I think the businessman would like most to be admired as the writer and thinker he is." That would explain the endless e-mails.

Because this is the solid thing about words, long or short: They wait for anyone who wants them, and cost nothing. You can use rare words for an ultra-efficient purpose, and you can juggle them for pleasure. But take the pleasure out of their use, and people stop using them.

"I don't think there is any goal in having a vocabulary," Thomas Delworth says from his perch toward the end of his rich spoken and written life. "I think it is its own reward. I can't give you a cost-effectiveness breakdown. You simply have a somewhat larger grasp of this vast empire you might command."

The alternative is that we use fewer and fewer of them, until the world is small enough that one word alone will suffice: Duh. (Interjection. Used to express actual or feigned ignorance or stupidity.)

Ian Brown is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.