Le Mot Juste: guest blog by Jon Obermeyer

The limit of my language is the limit of my world--Ludwig Wittgenstein

Word choice is mostly about what you remove.

Word choice is about what you remove.

Word choice is about removal.

Remove words.

The average sentence is about 25 words long, and the average page of text is 250 words.

You can arguably make three passes through each sentence you write and remove one weak word on every pass. About 90% of what you wrote remains, but it will be more powerful.

"Brevity is the soul of wit," is an oft-repeated phrase you should think about when writing.

As a poet, I'm all about visual presentation. My line breaks are not random; they are intentional.

Lines of poetry are like mountain ledges protruding.

How far out can the poet venture on a line until it crumbles and the poet tumbles into the valley below?

We read down the page with a poem, but what we are really doing is ascending a cliff face, one handhold and piton at a time.

In prose, I'm not a fan of the ultra-long paragraph.

For the reader, it's an opaque gray blob that repels the eye and the mind. It's flabby with a dangerously high Body-Mass Index. It could be fatal to your story.

I'm a fan of the one-sentence paragraph.

It's sits there isolated and naked on the page, a dynamo for my story.

A single sentence paragraph is a crooner in a leather jacket, leaning against a light post.

It's a lighthouse beam, sweeping the sea.

It's my dealer on the corner, waiting for a drop.

Now let's talk about the single word.

"Le Mot Juste" is a term tossed about the English majors, poorly paid editors and book club hostesses, translated from the French as "the exact word."

Le mot juste is the perfect word that trips the tumbler, the key that activates the nuclear warheads of your prose.

Poets do not spray buckshot from a shotgun in hopes of hitting their prey with verbal volume. Poets are snipers who can shatter a victim's back molars from two miles away while polishing the front teeth.

Take the precision required to work in the haiku form, the 5-7-5 syllable format, three lines with two main images and a kireji (cutting word) between them.

When you are counting syllables on your fingers, you are working in the base code of writing. Haiku is far too precise for my taste. I admittedly play it loosely for the perfectionists.

Some people have Word of the Day calendars or subscribe to Word of the Day services. I don't find these organic enough for my writing; I want my new words to arise out of overheard speech, what I read, or my curiousity.

George Costanza on the sitcom Seinfeld was famous for throwing around big words like "anathema" or showing off cleverly in this exchange"

George: We had an incredible phone conversation. We talked for like twenty minutes. I thought she had a great voice timbre. Is it timbre or tamber?

Jerry: I think it's tamber.

George: Why'd I think it was timbre?

Jerry: I didn't notice the voice.

George: It's melliflous!

I'm a lover of words, but not a show-off. I'd rather slip a word slyly into a poem or a sentence, subtly, and let it explode out of nowhere.

I'm hooked on the online etymology dictionary. Word origins fascinate me. It's like knowing the lineage of a racehorse, both the sire and the dam. "Sire" derives from "elder," and "dam" comes from "dame" and domus, the Latin word for house.

"Authentic" shares the same root as "author."

You might not have known that.

When you write, you express your authenticity.

Jon Obermeyer is a recovering English major and word whisperer who lives in Durham, NC.