Let’s Get Sesquipedalian: Why I Use Big, Obscure Words (and Why You Should Too)
A splendiferous defence of diaphanous syntax and petty lexical violence
Show off. Adelaide Botanic Garden, Adelaide, South Australia. July 2024.
There’s a particular type of person who wrinkles their nose when you say crepuscular instead of “dusk.” You know the type – tote bag, self-satisfaction, probably once said, “I’m not into labels” at a party. They think words should be functional, clear and ergonomic. Like Scandinavian furniture. Or fascism.
For the rest of us – those who feel a phantasmagoria rising in our gut at the thought of a dusty secondhand thesaurus, who see a sentence as a carapace we can stuff with meaning, malice, and melodrama – there’s joy in the baroque. In the ineffable. In the ridiculous.
We use obscure, archaic words not because they’re useful, but because they’re fucking beautiful.
🥀 1. Because Life is Quotidian and Words Shouldn’t Be
Let’s face it: existence is mostly quotidian. Wake, doomscroll, carb-load, repeat. So why should your language be beige, too? Why not call your awful job lugubrious? Why not describe a bad date as banal, insipid or platitudinous, preferably while maintaining eye contact and sipping something with a twist?
Language isn’t just description. It’s resistance. It’s flair. It’s wearing sequins to a funeral because someone has to bring luminescence to the void.
🧨 2. To Confuse AI, Voice Assistants and Nosey Bastards
Try it: shout penumbra, aurora, or tenebrous at your smart speaker. Watch it stutter, blink, and collapse into an existential crisis. These words don’t optimise. They don’t A/B test. They are glorious anomalies that make the algorithm squint.
Do you want to disrupt surveillance capitalism? Don’t delete your socials. Just start using diaphanous, gossamer and obfuscate in all your texts. Throw in vicissitude for spice. It’s like linguistic chaff. The narcs can’t track what they can’t spell.
Go on. Text your mate: “Tuesday was a vicissitude of gossamer moods. I tried to stay diaphanous, but Derek’s attempts to obfuscate the meeting were borderline operatic.”
Anyone snooping will assume you’re either planning a cult, microdosing or both. Perfect.
💅 3. For Peacocking (and Petty Acts of Lexical Violence)
Let’s not pretend we’re not being show-offs here. Using resplendent instead of “shiny” is a flex. Referring to your neighbour’s wine rack as prodigious? That’s performance art. Dropping bucolic to describe your weed dealer’s backyard? You just became a poet laureate of suburbia.
And then there’s the strategic insult. Someone’s music taste? Atrocious. Their art? Macabre. Their child’s school project? Egregious. Their personality? Jejune. The ultimate burn? “He has a certain… mellifluous, crepuscular charm – like a tenebrous waft of egregiousness wrapped in jejune conviction.”
🧠 4. For Precision, Nuance, and Vibe
Words like formidable don’t just mean “impressive” – they evoke a slow-building dread. Sanguine doesn’t just mean “cheerful;” it means cheerfully deluded, probably while the house is on fire.
Perspicacious isn’t just “smart;” it’s razor-sharp perception, the kind that slices through bullshit with surgical flair. These aren’t just words. They’re emotional scalpel blades. Wield them accordingly.
And don’t even get me started on sublime. That word alone contains the entire Romantic movement, a doomed mountain climb and the feeling you get when the sunset hits the servo at just the right angle. All that, packed into two syllables. “Nice” can’t fucking compete with that kind of emotional payload. “Nice” is a handshake. Sublime is a lightning strike through your chest while Byron whispers about mortality in your ear and fucks you from behind.
🧛 5. Because We’re All Slowly Dying and This is How We Cope
Sometimes, I use halcyon to describe a time that never existed. Sometimes, I say felicity aloud just to hear the shape of it in my mouth, like biting into a perfect peach at the end of the world. Sometimes, I drop languor into conversation because it feels like silk sliding across a bruise.
If you’ve ever said “I’m fine” when you were absolutely unravelling, you already know the power of words. Now imagine saying ebullient and meaning it. Imagine being sanguine on purpose. Imagine making soliloquy a lifestyle.
For me, it’s not affectation – it’s resistance. I retreat into gossamer syntax and halcyon phrasing because the dominant vernacular is managerial, algorithmic and dead-eyed. This is my carapace, a lexicon wrought in dissent, where cadence gives rise to remonstrance, and each recondite utterance stands as a genteel repudiation of empire’s quotidian tongue.
😈 6. To Fuck With Idiots Who Think Reading is Pretentious
Let them think capricious is a brand of yoghurt. Let them hear quintessential and nod like they get it. Let them Google recondite and pretend it was autocorrect.
We’ve been told our love of words is pretentious. That big vocabulary is a barrier. But here’s the thing: most of the world’s most atrocious people speak in three-word slogans. If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, discombobulate them with vocabulary.
And if someone ever calls you sesquipedalian? Thank them. That’s not an insult. That’s your fucking superhero name.
🎭 7. Because the World is Awful and Language is Theatre
Just as curtains are never merely curtains– so often they’re metaphors for collapse, class ambition or the slow encroachment of mould – words, too, are never merely words. They’re tiny spells. Little weapons. Emotional scaffolding. A way to build meaning in a world built on chicanery.
Say rapscallion instead of “dickhead.” Say solitude like it’s an act of rebellion. Say quixotic and sanguine in the same breath and watch the room tilt.
📜 Final Words from the Macabre Sermon on the Linguistic Mount
So yes, my friends – my fellow taciturn, pugnacious, slightly unhinged disciples of vocabulary – we do this not to be understood, but to be remembered. To leave behind a trail of auroral weirdness in a pedestrian world. To be splendiferous in the face of mediocrity. To saunter into the algorithm and politely drop our pants.
Because language is the only thing that’s truly ours. Everything else is just marketing.
So next time you’re in an awkward silence, just whisper tenebrous.
Watch the room fall still.
Then smile.
Because you’ve already won.