The Right Tool

A while back I came across the word "brisance" in a manuscript. I was not familiar with the word, nor did the context supply enough information for me to know, so I looked it up in the dictionary closest to hand. "Brisance" was not to be found; nor did I find a word similar enough that made sense in the context for me to believe it was a typographical error. (Digital dictionaries make that sort of search so much easier than they were in the Grammopticon's ill-spent youth.) On to Google. (Another modern miracle.) There I learned that "brisance" is the measure of destructive power of an explosive, specifically its shattering power: how quickly it achieves maximum pressure to form a shock wave that will shatter or fragment materials that come in contact with the propagating wave. Very precise. Very useful if one is discussing the fine points of explosives. I don't expect to be using it in conversation often.

I don't expect to be hearing or reading it often, either. I don't spend much time on the finer points of intentional destruction. (The Grammopticon may occasionally terrify, but she is not a terrorist.) 

Should the author, then, have used a different word? I did, after all, stop reading the book to go on a search for the word. Did that serve the author's storytelling intent?

This is the tension every writer must occasionally address, whether writing novels, technical manuals, or emails to Aunt Sadie. Who is your audience and what may you assume?

In this case I do think the author used the right word. Although I may not know much about weapons of mass destruction, the character did, and was assessing whether he had the right tool for the (destructive) job at hand. Moreover, it was one unfamiliar (to me, at least) word within a paragraph in which the character considered other, more familiar attributes of explosives. Were I not the Grammopticon, I might just as easily let the unfamiliar word slide past without stopping to question its meaning and still grasped what was going on. And if I were a reader knowledgeable in the use of explosives (perhaps an Iraq War veteran, in which case the information might have been both essential and vivid), I would have trusted the author and believed fully in his character--the man clearly knows what he's talking about. In this case using "brisance" served the author's storytelling intent just fine.

But look again at the reasons I agree:

• It was appropriate to the context.
• The reader could follow the story without understanding it.
• It added verisimilitude.

Using the unfamiliar word wasn't just okay: it improved the text. It demostrated persuasively that the character has technical knowledge of explosives (at least exceeding that of the Grammopticon). It was a case of superb word choice: the word conveyed meaning precisely while also conveying something about the character.

One can use words that are likely to be unfamiliar to your audience to serve a number of purposes.

• To convey expertise
• To teach
• To flummox

In the case above, the author clearly conveyed expertise: that of his fictional character, and the author's own knowledge of the subject at hand. It made for a better book.

One often learns new words by seeing them in context. An author writing for young people might use a word his or her audience is unlikely to have encountered, with the hope that the readers will learn from the context (or from looking it up) what it means. Lemony Snicket does this masterfully. No matter how old you are, you might pick up some new vocabulary from the Series of Unfortunate Events books. Had I found "brisance" in a nonfiction book about explosives, I would likely have learned the meaning there because the author intended me to learn it, along with a lot of other things about explosives.

As for flummoxing or confusing your readers, well, there might be a place for that now and again--perhaps if the point is that something is confusing or incomprehensible. If your real point, however, is to prove that you're smarter than other people, well, you may or may not succeed at demonstrating that. You will definitely prove yourself to be an ass. That's valuable: it saves the rest of us the trouble.

P.S. I will Google "brisance" in a few days to see how many people read this and then found uses for their new vocabulary word.