Actually Ileein designed the crown himself, I just crafted it later. But thank you for that nice comment anyway.

Thus the overweening verbosity (I mean, really, amaranthine?) which happens to be a tendency of mine.

Do not discredit your own natural capabilities with such a disasteful word as 'tendency'. Verbosity is both a skill and a gift, and one should embrace it for what it is! Embrace the pleonasm!

I like small words. Simple is fun.

I like the occasional SAT word thrown in for flavor, but descriptions that use nothing but them are annoying. Yes, yes. You have a great big huge vocabulary. We get it. But, really, it stopped being impressive a while ago. Now, I'm just wondering why you can't just say something's big or dark or is sparkly. Saying it's commodious or atramentous or that it scintillates doesn't make it bigger or darker or more sparkly.

I'm not saying that everything should be written for a 5th grader to read, but there comes a point where you're not even describing something anymore, you're just trying to show off your big words.

The reason you use big words is for variety, as well as for subtlety. That is, you don't want to use "dark" "shadowy" "dull" "dark" "dull" "shadowy" over and over again. You might use "tenebrous," instead. As well, "effulgent" is a slightly different word than "scintillating." The former refers to a softer, more internal radiance, while the latter refers to a brightly sparkling, perhaps reflective one, in general. Both could take the place of "glowing" or "shining," but give a better image of what you mean.

Pot, meet kettle.

...

The english language provides so much variety! Why should I say someone is 'holy' or 'devout' when I can call them 'pious' or 'pietistic'? Why is something 'blessed' or 'sanctified' when it can be 'sacrosanct'? There's so many ways I can describe something! It's not showing off, it's finding the perfect word to describe precisely the situation as you see it.

I actually always get bothered when people describe objects/things/persons with 'simple' terms - I mean, there's so many colours in the world, so many shades! Why describe something so simplistic, when all the world is so complex?

I agree! (See last entry for the best color reference ever used in a literary work.)

I like that Lusternia can embiggen your vocabulary. Using too many prize words can have the opposite effect than being impressive though, coming across as if you're masturbating a thesaurus. I think they're good, as Ileein said, to avoid repetition, and also to succinctly be specific; "fulgurant" beats "like lightning" with a stick.

My favourite:



Some definite winners there, however.

That's all I'm saying. I like big words too, but too much of a good thing is still too much, you know?

How did you miss "sesquipedalian grandiloquence" there?

I absolutely love that word <3

I used it in a poem a while back that no one could understand. Most the words only showed up in dictionaries from Lovecraft's era.



My favorite word is mien

My spellchecker wasn't working on Firefox for some reason, and I was terrified of misspelling something.

Frankly, I think "tenebrous" is more often used than "dark" by now. (Though nothing could possibly be more overused than "shadow" is.)

How about 'Umbral'?

Four words: "In the available light."

I thought some of them seemed good, actually.

That's positively evocative. My favorite bad one: