They Like Big Words and They Cannot Lie
Ms. Birdwhistle had asked Ms. Gotobed to meet her for a stroll through the park. The day was just cool enough to need a shawl, which was perfect because Ms. Birdwhistle had just knit a new one. She wrapped her newest creation around a little snugger around her shoulders. The ladies’ boots scattered little gravel pebbles as they promenaded properly.
Ms. Birdwhistle reached into her reticule, took out her new pince-nez, balanced them upon her nose and sighed dramatically, “Dearest Ms. Gotobed. I ascertain that my vernacular comprises multifarious colloquialisms which might engender others to conjecture that one as myself is less than sagacious.”
Ms. Gotobed, coveting the new pince-nez, picked up her monocle that dangled from her chatelaine and replied, “Darling Ms. Birdwhistle, I know not what has betided you. Your linguistic forms are polysyllabic, neologistic, exuberance, and jubilation itself. It must assuredly be that we are both espied as equivalently polymath virtuosos! Or is it virtuosi?”
From out of her reticule, Ms. Birdwhistle removed a tiny leather bound book with Thesaurus stamped in gold leaf across the cover and the spine. She read for a moment as she continued to walk and almost greeted a tree quite forcefully. Soon she replied, “That can be categorically nonplussing. I would eschew such parlance. I espouse rather, ‘bluestocking savants.’”
“Why needless to say, that was a thoroughly perspicacious excursion of expression. I surmise we appear more erudite, educated, and percipient continuingly!” Answered Ms. Gotobed eyeing the tiny volume with narrowed and lusty eyes.
At just that moment an editor, known by the red ink staining their pocket where a fountain pen leaked; a poet, wearing a beret and quietly playing a bongo; and a professor, wearing his cap and slightly, but quaintly, disheveled gown, walked by.
The editor said, “Thank goodness they’re not my clients! No one suggest they write a book.”
The poet said, “Their words rattle and clang in my ears and have given me a headache.”
The professor said, “Big words do not suggest big brains. Knowing when to use a big word, now that’s the stratagem.”
“Indubitably!” agreed the editor and the poet (who drummed out a little duh-dun-dun DAH on her bongo) as they and the professor passed by the ladies who had paused to overhear just how impressed the passersby would be by their intelligent talk.
