That was my point: English imported words, rather than applying existing English words, or ignoring the foreign words entirely.

Neither the people of India nor Native Americans settled in England to bring those words in.

I was struck by the same thing when I read Toni Morrison and Saul Bellow. I did not "like" either story and did not read much, but it was obvious to me that every word had to be there and no other word would do. I was humbled.

Stormi wrote: "I think I became aware of the similarity while reading Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel" years ago. Each word seems to express a specific emotion which no similar word would quite have expressed in the same way."

You are right, the newscasters do not know their English. Neither do teachers. When our daughter was in school, I saw a big display in the classroom, demonstrating for the kids similes and metaphors. Sadly, they were reversed, leaving me to find a polite way to inform the teacher of her error! To me, we are using words as if we have only eight colors with which to paint a picture. ears ago, we had a multitude of colors (words) with which to paint. I think I became aware of the similarity while reading Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward Angel" years ago. Each word seems to express a specific emotion which no similar word would quite have expressed in the same way..

For redundancy, is it near vs. nearby?
For sophisticated words (mixed with redundancy), think of using "pleonasm" to describe "tautological taxemics".
Never use a big word when exiguous terminology suffices.
Signed: Department of Redundancy Department

“Mutual Assured Destruction” is probably just sloppiness for brevity. Like "direct dial" where dial is always used as a verb.
By the way, adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs: directly dial, clearly good, extremely quickly.

You're living in the ASCII/Unicode age where all funny symbols are pretty much equivalent to any other letter or symbol. Look at Morse code for letter characters, which range from a single dot or dash for E and T, respectively, to a maximum of four, like di-di-di-dah as V (for Victory). As the code gets longer for odd characters and signal elements (like end-of-transmission) there is more chance for error or misinterpretation.
Di-di-dit da-da-dah Di-di-dit. SOS Save Our Ship.

That reminds me of an article that a friend of mine published in college whereby the spell checker found it equally acceptable for the government to issue pubic checks as well as public checks.

Sorry for the quantity of material in this brain dump addressed to both MikeMarotta and Seer. I’m covering a lot of diverse points in your discussions. Please feel free to jump on me if you think I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying.

I assume that Seer’s “streamlining” is a call to avoid wordiness. Consider these: concise, succinct, brief, terse. Review Shakespeare’s take on the subject in Hamlet, Act II, Scene II. Polonius rambles on and on while including the brilliant nugget, “brevity is the soul of wit,” in his blather. The Queen retorts, “More matter with less art.”

Epistemological concept formation is not a “less is more” device for trimming excess verbiage. It is as expressed, a way to subsume huge quantities of referents via intellectual shorthand; integrating them by their common characteristics and differentiating them by their differences. For example, a “vehicle” integrates the concept of carrying passengers from one place to another. They are differentiated by their form and propulsion: car, bus, wagon, hovercraft.

Orwellian Newspeak is an attempt to limit concept formation and the subtlety of thought by replacing vocabulary with a primitive structure. All very bad things become double-plus ungood, losing all the shades of meaning among: dreadful, awful, terrible, horrendous, catastrophic, atrocious, ghastly, unbearable.

Note MikeMarotta’s example, “I will recommend to my wife that she call you.” Compare with, “I’ll make sure that she calls you.” Those who use good grammar may recognize both as correct, however, only the hard-core grammar nerd would express the difference as a subjunctive (or even jussive) mood vs. indicative mood. “Look up mood!” (That’s an example of imperative mood.)

I strongly recommend a course from “The Great Courses” available as either CD or DVD: The Story of Human Language by Prof. John McWhorter. It’s 36 half-hour lectures, and he is very informative, personable, and entertaining—everything you’d like in an educator. The CD version is great for daily car commuting.

Your examples of wigwam and verandah are two different “Indians.” The first word is North American Algonquian, the second has Indo-European roots from the Indian subcontinent. Veranda goes with shampoo, which is the imperative form of the Hindi champna (to press or knead).
Wigwam is closer kin to the Plains Indian teepee, as in the joke:
Doctor, I’m having recurring dreams where first I’m a teepee, then I’m a wigwam, then I’m a teepee, then I’m a wigwam. The doctor says to me, “You’re two tents!” (too tense)

How about optimize? Or combine optimize and simplify to create a new word, "simplimize" or "optify".

(Be first on your block to use these words, amaze your friends!!!)
:-)

NO!

The human brain seems to be able to read text where the first and last letters of words are correctly placed and those in between are randomly scrambled as long as there is a little context.
I have the problem of changing word spellings while reading with regard to words next to the word or from sentences above or below the word. That makes for slow reading when one reads a sentence over and over without meaning and finally checks it word for word only to find a made up reading of some word. That limits me to about ten pages an hour for literature and does not matter much for math, physics, and chemistry.

Thank you for pointing that out to me. I appreciate your comments and will attempt to do better in the future.

Editing costs time and money so many newspapers don't pay for editing any more, and journalists are forced to self-edit, and it is difficult to edit your own stuff except, perhaps, in hindsight (after clicking).
On the other hand, I once had a newspaper article in which the editor changed the headline from It's Spring to Its Spring. I wanted the contraction of 'it is' not the possessive form of it.

It bothers me because they do not edit their work. They depend upon spell check, which reveals their foolishness.