One thing that readers of the Central Wongery may (or may not) have noticed is that in the articles there I occasionally employ words that are not in common use and are probably unfamiliar to the majority of readers. I'm not talking about making up my own words—though I do that too—I'm referring to words that can be found in the dictionary, but are rare—or in some cases even archaic or obsolete. I recognize that using such words may have some drawbacks. If nothing else, they do make the text slightly harder to understand, albeit not impossible. Where a word's meaning isn't apparent from the context, it's only a quick dictionary consultation away. Still, I suppose this may pose a minor inconvenience, and while some logophilic readers may appreciate being introduced to new vocables, others may find these incognita offputting and annoying.

So why do I do it? It's not to show off my prodigious vocabulary. I don't have a prodigious vocabulary. These are not words I know off the top of my head. They are not part of my working vocabulary. I make heavy use of dictionaries and thesauri. My actual working vocabulary is merely adequate at best, and when reading I frequently run across words that I have to look up despite their being much less recondite than those I use in the Wongery.

So, again, why do I do it? Well, I can give three reasons.

First: To disguise my identity. As I have mentioned before, "Clay Salvage" is not my legal name, and for reasons unclear even to myself I prefer to keep my real identity a secret. But what if someone should compare what I've written on the Wongery to what I've written elsewhere under other names, and identify me through my writing style? Well, I don't make such use of obscure and obsolete words in my writing outside the Wongery, at least not to the same extent, so my use of them here serves to differentiate my writing on the Wongery from my writing elsewhere and obfuscate the resemblance.

Now, this is a very stupid reason, for two, uh, reasons. First, it's not likely to work. Sure, maybe I make different lexical choices in the Wongery than I do in my other writing, but that doesn't mean there aren't other distinctive details that a determined investigator could pick up. I'm sure there are enough telltale characteristics of my phrasing, my grammar, and even my punctuation that I couldn't fully disguise even if I went through the trouble to try, and that could give away the shared provenance of my opera under a sufficiently careful analysis. Second, it's not likely to come up anyway. It's not like there are widely circulating samples of my other writing to compare it to. I'm not a published author—although not for want of trying; when I was much younger I did send out queries about some novels I'd written to a few agents and publishers, but they were always met with rejection. (Maybe I wasn't persistent enough; I don't think I sent any of them out more than a handful of times before losing interest. On the other hand, more likely my error wasn't in being insufficiently persistent, but in ever thinking my work might have been publishable in the first place; with the benefit of hindsight and somewhat more though still crudely refined judgment, it's obvious now that those novels were, well, pretty awful, and no matter how many agents and publishers I sent them out to I doubt I could have found one who would have been willing to touch them with a ten foot pole. A gifted writer I am not.) While there are some samples of my writing online aside from the Wongery, it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone will run across my old LiveJournal and decide to compare it to my Wongery articles to see if they were written by the same person.

Second: For flavor. The Wongery is, of course, a work of fiction, as stated in its disclaimer, but, as stated there and in the Public Wongery Manual of Style (or as will be stated in the Public Wongery Manual of Style; at the time I'm writing this that's one of the many articles I have partially written but not yet finished and posted—the Wongery is written "in what Wikipedia would call an 'in-universe style'... as if by some unspecified æalogist or other scholar knowledgeable about the subjects in question." Using words not in current common use on Earth makes the Wongery feel slightly more otherworldly, and contributes to the impression of its being an excerpt from a scholarly work from another world. Or maybe it doesn't do that at all and I'm just talking out of my figurative hat.

The third reason is the most important, and in fact quite likely is the real reason I'm doing this while the other two supposed reasons are post hoc rationalizations. This third reason for my using all these obscure words is the following: because it's fun. I like language; I like words; I enjoy learning about these obscure words and finding places to fit them in.

Nevertheless, I suppose I should probably cut down on it a bit. Not only because, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, it's not great for comprehension and usability, but also because it takes time to look up these words and figure out how to work them into the text, and I'm getting new articles up far too slowly as it is. Still, while I may try to restrain myself hereafter, I'm unlikely to drop this practice entirely, so I thought I might as well explain its rationale, for anyone who might wonder. Is this something I should be doing? Almost certainly not, but then at this point I'm not sure what is.