PERSPICACIOUS AND POLYSYLLABIC Wall Street Journal columnist Elizabeth Bernstein pleads guilty to loving big words and is “worried that big words — the challenging expressive and interesting ones — might start going away.” And she wonders: “Can people who enjoy using big and obscure words and those who are annoyed by them get through to each other?”

Ms. Bernstein claims that “technology is largely to blame for big words’ fade out.” But that assertion may be causing some readers to wonder whether the real reason behind this column’s frequent critique of galloping technological advances is the threat they pose not to society but to the opportunity for free and unrestricted indulgence in polysyllabic excess. Might my ongoing efforts to detail the manifold societal casualties of the digital age be a mere front a pose on my part?

Perish the thought. After all Bernstein’s assertion that technology will be the undoing of polysyllabic usage is based on the fact that “we are being conditioned to communicate faster and in shorter bursts. There isn’t room for big words in a text or a tweet or even a quickly dashed-off e-mail.…(“R u with me?”).”

But I’m not affected by any of this at all. I don’t tweet nor do I have the foggiest notion of how to do so (although I am jealous of a family friend’s talent for doing a mean birdcall). As for texts and e-mails I’ve written here previously of my determination to treat those modes of communication with the very same attention to proper literary conventions that I would give to writing a letter or essay. And so I’m not concerned in the least about technology’s effects on my word usage; all that’s left for me to worry about is the small matter of what it’s doing to undermine the foundations of human society as we know it.

Bernstein rues that the College Board which administers the SAT tests necessary for admission to college has decided to stop “quizzing students on definitions of words such as ‘prevaricator’ ‘sagacious ’ and ‘ignominious ’” and to test instead for their understanding of “words whose meanings shift in context like ‘synthesis’ and ‘empirical.’” May I suggest that for students aspiring to political careers that latter testing category should include supplementary words like “keep ” as in the phrase “you can keep your [insurance] policy”?

The College Board’s apparent turn toward a “dumbing down” of literary standards will thankfully not affect large numbers of our own young men who in any event don’t have a college education in their futures. They thus have no reason at all to stop using those aforementioned wonderfully enriching words in sentences like “Said the sagacious Rabi Yosi ‘If so what has the prevaricator lost’ (which loss might spur him to confess his ignominious intentions).” Ayein Bava Metziah 3a.

College-bound or not there’s no reason of course why yeshivah guys can’t add to their repertoire the newly introduced “synthesis” and “empirical.” Other additions to the category of “words whose meanings shift in context ” might be words like “matzav” and “handl ” which back when I was in yeshivah meant nothing like they do today.

Ms. Bernstein also makes a point I’ve made here before that big-word users “aren’t intimidated by sesquipedalian language because they like discovering new words and looking them up” and she quotes a Massachusetts attorney named Ramsey Bahrawy who says he learned to love big words from his mother who taught him to look up any word he didn’t know. Nowadays however he “uses big words only when he is speaking with family members or friends he knows will understand them. Words that he saves for people he knows well include ‘perfidiousness ’ ‘excogitate ’ ‘perspicacious ’ and ‘remunerative.’” Honestly now would you want to be at a party with this guy?

The truth is Mr. Bahrawy does understand that “big words have an intimidation factor.” According to Bahrawy that’s why “when speaking with clients jury members and even other attorneys ” he limits himself to a vocabulary “appropriate for someone with a fifth-grade education.” Note to attorney readers: He said that not me.

Ultimately Mr. Bahrawy has some advice for determining which words are appropriate to use in a given conversation: “Throw a big word out there and gauge a person’s reaction. If the reaction is a blank stare… adjust what you have to say.”

Now that’s wonderful for him. But I write a magazine column.

HAVE NO FEAR? The beautiful Yom Tov of Pesach is about to arrive and with it an opportunity to reexperience the surpassing ahavah love of Hashem for His special People. Pesach is the festival corresponding to Avraham Avinu paragon of love for the Divine and for man apex of His creation. It is the time in our national life that the Navi describes with the phrase “ahavas klulosayich.”
And all this makes it too a perfect time to talk about yirah.
There are many different forms of spiritual yirah (loosely translated as “fear”): There is the fear yiras haromemus that wells up within one upon contemplating the vastness and ineffable complexity of Hashem’s creation through which an inkling of Hashem’s awesome omnipotence and omniscience and man’s utter inconsequentiality in the scheme of things begins to dawn. There is the fear of punishment yiras ha’onesh of being gifted a single inexpressibly priceless chance to pass the series of tests that we call Olam Hazeh and merit thereby to live on in supreme spiritual ecstasy forever and ever — and botching it.
There is the fear or call it nervous tension one feels in possessing something exceedingly delicate and all-too-breakable — a rare treasure a precious relationship an exalted status — and being afraid of losing it damaging it. And there is the fear of sin itself yiras cheit of what pursuit of illusion will do to us how it will transform us into that which we won’t even recognize.
All these levels of yirah are entirely positive. And more: All coexist not only in perfect harmony but in symbiosis with ahavas Hashem. Ahavah births yirah and yirah births ahavah — a paradox that exists only in the realm of the spirit but not of the body. I tremble before the Source of all reality — and am gripped by an all-consuming desire to know and unite with Him. I love Him dearly — and fear becoming distant from even abominable to Him. The Sfas Emes explains that “Avraham bore Yitzchak” (Bereishis 25:19) means that Avraham’s middas ha’ahavah gave rise to Yitzchak’s middas hayirah; yet at the Akeidah Avraham is extolled as a yerei Elokim because it is that fear which authenticates his ahavah too.
But nowadays yirah gets a bad rap. The influences of a psychotherapeutic culture that equates fear with neurosis and of an age of insubordination toward all authority and the Divine most of all combine to make us chary of speaking too often and too admiringly about yirah. And even when we do we prettify things speaking only of yiras haromemus and referring even to it as “awe” or “reverence.”
But there’s also the sad fact that the world we inhabit is indeed filled with all sorts of fears none of which are legitimate or healthy whether the fear of evildoers or of falling victim to the host of everyday bogeymen with which entire American industries seek to frighten us the better to peddle their wares to us. The negativity that attaches to these bogus fears then casts its shadow over spiritually based yirah tainting it for us.
And that’s a great shame because there’s nothing more natural and wholesome more productive of love and growth than to experience fear so long as it is rooted in reality a fear of the sort that propels one forward rather than immobilizes him a fear of only One which banishes all other fears.