In a Washington Post review of a recent performance by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, music writer Robert Battey used the word velleity when he wrote:
Shostakovich’s Twelfth Symphony (“The Year 1917”) was completed in 1961, shortly after he stunned friends and colleagues by finally joining the Communist Party.…But though he may have had a velleity toward ingratiating himself with the Soviets at some level, his musical soul figuratively held its nose.
Velleity? It's a wish or a want that you're not prepared to take action to fulfill — think of your desire to cut out chocolate...after Halloween. But in spite of how common the concept of velleity is, the word itself is obscure — our dictionary tells us we can expect to see it appear once in every 369,354 pages of text. Which led Post reader Richard H. Sawyer to complain in a letter to the editor, "Music reviews can be difficult enough to follow without their writers resorting to words spoken rarely and found only in unabridged dictionaries."
His comment sparked debate among the community of Post readers. Some, like Mitchell E. Davis, asked "How many readers want to take time out to research words they are unlikely to ever use or see again?" Others defended and praised the Post for allowing a rare word to show up in print. "Thank you to The Post for...the opportunity to learn a very useful word," wrote Mitch Friedfeld. Jack Aubert weighed in, "If all writing is to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator of words commonly used in speech, we will lose the larger part of our English language and be the poorer for it."
We’ve seen this question raised before, in debates around newspapers’ use of limn, synecdoche, and other uncommon words. They raise some important questions, productive for all vocabularians to ponder. And perhaps most tellingly, they demonstrate how passionate we can all be about language and the ways it defines us, our newspapers, and even our culture. So debate away!
What do you think? Velleity is obscure. But does that mean we should never use it at all? And what about other obscure words? As you learn vocabulary on Vocabulary.com, do you have a strategy for incorporating them into your speech and writing? Can you think of a word that's just too obscure to use? Leave a comment and let us know!