Pomp and Circumstance

In a recent online interview, Canadian journalist Heather Mallick declined to identify her job that way. "She finds the word 'journalist' too pompous," the interviewer reported. "Instead, she calls herself an opinionator."

Now, I'm sure Mallick is using "opinionator" tongue in cheek, as a pretend-pretentious word, just as the New York Times blog by that name does. Still, anyone who thinks "journalist" is a pompous word hasn't spent much time around working journalists.

Or maybe the problem word is pompous. Like its soulmate pretentious, and their acquaintances awkward and ugly, it seems to be losing its focus, as people increasingly use it to mean merely "usage I don't much like." There's even a website called Pompous Ass Words, dedicated to dissing "pretentious" words like torpor, pedagogy, and risible.

I'm not denying that there are pompous paragraphs, pretentious descriptions, and ostentatious strings of adjectives all around. They cluster most densely, these days, in business bafflegab of the sort Don Watson pilloried in his 2005 book "Death Sentences": "Due to the recent unprecedented demand for the publication...and therefore a diminution of stocks, there is now an exigency to restrict dissemination of this publication."

But words on their own aren't pompous or pretentious. These labels mean only that the style (of language or dress or décor) is too fancy for the occasion, that the writer has worn his tuxedo to a barbecue. But there's a place for formal dress; even limn or marmoreal or utilize might be, in some situation, le mot juste.

So what do we really mean when we call words "pretentious" and "pompous"? Most often, as in Watson's example, we mean "used or misused in pretentious ways." When people say synergy and leverage and exponential are pretentious, they don't mean the words are illegitimate in their scientific senses. They're criticizing the popular borrowing of those words as vague, inflationary prose-puffers.

But "pretentious" and "pompous" are hardly reserved as labels for self-important statements. In the samples collected from the Web and from e-mail, some people use them pre-emptively, like puppies signaling submission, to apologize in advance: "If I might use such a pretentious word" (oxymoronic), "There we go with a big old pretentious word again" (eponymous).

Others think anything newish -- recent coinages like blog, British imports like gone missing, verbs like segue and curate -- is (among other nasty things) pompous.

But in other cases, it's impossible to know what the accusations mean. In what way is pled, an ancient and honorable past tense, "pretentious"? The plain descriptive word saga? Or the slogan "less is more"? And the writer who called fashionista "pretentious" must be way overdue for a funny-bone scan.

It's OK, of course, to dislike words and phrases, whatever your reasons; everyone has a little blacklist. But when you call them "pretentious" or "ignorant," you're describing not just the words but the people who use them, implying that they're social climbers, snooty, or (in another common sneer) "trying to sound educated."

But that's a long logical leap from a short word. Maybe the person using "gone missing" has been saying it for 10 years, and has no sense at all that it's new to you. Segue may seem overworked, if you read a lot of music reviews, but after 50 years of use it's no longer showy. In terms of may be filler -- every speaker needs some filler -- but is it really there to "sound important"?

I can only imagine how the Pompous Patrol would react if it stumbled on the Gettysburg Address. Fourscore and seven years ago? "Gimme a break already, it's the 21st century!" Little note nor long remember? "Hey, buddy, speak English, OK?"

And when it comes to pronunciations, the name-calling is even more strident. I enjoy Charles Harrington Elster's "Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations," humorous exaggeration and all, but the author has delusions of omniscience: He thinks he's figured out the sordid motivations behind many of the mispronunciations he deplores.

For instance, AHN-vuh-lohp (the pronunciation of my native Northern Ohio) is "phony," says Elster. Pronouncing mirror as MEER is "slovenly." Calling the supermarket a GROSH-ree is "ugsome," a pronunciation "straight out of lower Slobbovia." But of course, my schoolmates and I weren't giving envelope a French twist or lazily smushing our grocery; we were using the educated speech of our region.

Maybe we need a few more adjectives in the arsenal of scorn: Word critics, after all, should be able to describe their disapproval accurately. How about "trendy," clichéd," and "overused," which at least are moderately verifiable charges? Or, where appropriate, "old-fashioned," "archaic," "poetic"? And don't forget "ironic": That "pompous" word may well be a joke.

It's safer to reserve "pompous" and "pretentious" for sentences and paragraphs, where they actually have some meaning. In the realm of words, they'll always be too subjective, so long as one woman's "pompous" is another's "precise."

E-mail Jan Freeman at freeman@globe.com. For the Word blog, go to boston.com/ideas/brainiac/word.