The Power of Simple Words - Terin Izil

548,134 views ・ 2012-03-12

TED-Ed


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:14
We all know the scene: Dorothy closes her eyes,
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and repeats the Good Witch's mantra,
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"No coordinates exist like one's domicile,
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no coordinates exist like one's domicile,
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00:24
no coordinates exist like one's domicile."
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Only Dorothy doesn't say that. She says five one-syllable words,
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"There's no place like home."
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00:35
Each a word you probably learned in your first year of speaking,
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each perfectly concise.
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00:40
It's not that L. Frank Baum didn't have a thesaurus,
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00:43
it's that in most cases $10 words fail.
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00:47
Would Aerosmith have had a hit with
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"Ambulate This Direction?"
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00:51
Probably not.
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Would Patrick Henry have ignited a revolution by saying,
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"Provide me with liberty or bestow upon me fatality?"
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00:59
Unlikely.
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01:01
When it comes to words, bigger isn't always better.
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Ten-dollar words are rendered worthless if they're not understood.
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01:08
That's not to say every piece of literature
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should be written at a fourth-grade reading level,
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but it is important to know your audience.
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01:15
If you're a novelist, your audience is probably expecting
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300 pages of vivid descriptors.
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01:21
At the very least, they're expecting
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you won't use the same 50 words to fill those pages.
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01:26
But most of us don't have the luxury of a captive audience.
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We're competing against a whole world of distractions
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01:32
and we're fighting for space in an attention span
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that continues to shrink across generations.
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So get to the point already.
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Variety may be the spice of life, but brevity is its bread and butter.
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So when it comes to $10 words,
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save your money and buy a Scrabble board.
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