simpliciter

Someone just wrote in response to my post on word usages that I hate, and asked about the use of simpliciter.

In my own work, I’m pretty sure that I’ve used that term only when referring to Zubíri, and simply because he uses it himself. It’s an old Scholastic term for what a thing is “plain and simple,” in its own right.

My view on the use of foreign words in English prose is fairly simple: I prefer to do it only when the foreign word is easily recognizable to the majority of readers in English. Otherwise, you’re showing off your erudition and breaking a bond with any readers who don’t understand the word, by putting yourself above them. You’re essentially telling your readers: “I belong to a higher educated class.”

So effectively, there are only two times when I would be likely to use foreign words. One would be, say, if I were writing something about Hegel, and used the word Geist without translation. I would never do that in a newspaper article, but in the case of a philosophy article you can be reasonably sure that every reader has some idea of what Geist means. The reader won’t feel excluded, and may even feel mildly flattered. The main point in any discussion, however, is not to exclude anyone who is present by talking above them or pretending to do so. It’s simply good manners.

The second case where I would do it is with foreign words that look an awful lot like their English equivalents. In this case, pretty much anyone can figure out what you mean to some degree, while the foreign term adds some elegant spice (as with French words) or some weighty historical gravitas (as with Latin terms).

Saying simpliciter rather than “plain and simple” seems stylistically acceptable to me, since pretty much anyone can take a ballpark guess that simpliciter has something to do with “simple” just by looking at it, and if they want to be doubly sure they can always look it up while not feeling too stupid about looking up, since they feel like they at least had a reasonable handle on its meaning from the start.

Then there is the book title I used, Circus Philosophicus. You don’t need to know a word of Latin to have a pretty good idea as to the content or at least the tone of that book. Meanwhile, the book itself is sufficiently bizarre that a respectable anchor in the Latin language does it plenty of good.

Leaving words like existentia and essentia in Latin has a nice stylistic effect. Pulling in less obvious Latin words to showboat your educational status is obnoxious and stylistically disruptive, unless you’re writing for an audience that you know for sure will understand you.