It may come as a shock, but some of the letters addressed to the author of Up at the Creek are not terribly friendly.

My very first column in these pages, way back in April of 2009, took the owner of a humble carwash to task simply for doing his job. If it hadn’t been for my mud-caked truck, and the tantrum inspired by being turned away from the car wash for very sensible reasons having to do with protecting Shermans Creek, I never would have tried regular op-ed writing.

I still regret that inaugural piece. But I’m also glad of it, nearly two hundred columns later, for starting me down a path that has become an important weekly discipline.

The angry response to that first column from the carwash owner was entirely justified; I only hope that my private letter of apology was accepted.

I’m in the habit of answering all of my correspondence, especially the unpleasant kind, even when I have a feeling that the letter was written by a wag.

One such letter arrived a few weeks ago, objecting to the use of the word “freaking” in a column I wrote on sonnets. My correspondent feigned ignorance of “freaking;” said he couldn’t find it in his dictionary; and accused me of using big words that made him feel dumb, which he spelled “d-u-m” for added sarcasm.

Of course, “freaking” does appear in the dictionary — several of them, in fact, as I pointed out in my response to him. It has a long and venerable history as a euphemism for stronger language.

Even though his letter was meant in fun — albeit, a kind of edgy fun, more than a little hostile — he may have had a point. This morning, as I reread the year’s columns, something that has become a kind of tradition for me in late December, I kept an eye out for rare or difficult words.

Here are just a few of the culprits I found:

tintinnabulation; ichnology; friable; bathyscaphe; envenomation; chary; tornadic; crepuscular; herpetological; adamantine; execrable; cruciverbalist; and auroch.

And that’s not counting the Latin phrases, or even the odd phrase in Sioux.

Now. Could I have used other, simpler words instead of these tricky ones? Perhaps, in some cases. Why use “execrable,” for instance, to describe the awful food one was served in the Soviet Union, circa 1984? Why not “lousy,” “suspicious,” or just plain “bad?”

I’m not sure how to defend “execrable,” except to say that I love the sound of it, which is alive with disgust; and to add that it always reminds me of another nasty word, the tail-end of a bad meal: “excretion.” All in all, not the adjective you’d want to see in a review of your new restaurant.

Many of the words in my “hit list” are technical or scientific. “Crepuscular,” for instance, is a perfect word for a female firefly — especially one with dubious morals, like Pennsylvania’s state insect — who sets her murderous man-trap at twilight.

“Ichnology,” another strange one, is the branch of geology that relates to animal traces — footprints, for instance, like the ghostly cat prints I found baked into an antique brick from the Loysville Orphanage. Footprints in brick aren’t exactly geological, even if their formation is similar. There’s a special word for the study of modern animal footprints, like those captured in brick — “neoichnology — ” but I decided against using it in my column. It just seemed … I don’t know, too much.

Sometimes there simply isn’t another way to say something without piling on a bunch of extra words. Take “bathyscaphe,” for example. You could accurately describe adventurer James Cameron’s submarine, the one he rode down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench this summer, as a bathyscaphe. Or, you could call it “a free-diving, self-propelled, deep-sea submersible with a crew-cabin similar to a bathysphere, but suspended from a float, rather than a surface cable.”

Which is the mouthful you get from the Wikipedia entry.

There’s often a trade-off between absolute precision on the one hand, and baffling obscurity on the other. My feeling is that the readers of this fine publication are grown-ups, most likely with Internet access — or, failing that, at least access to a good, old-fashioned dictionary.

I try my best not to use words that obscure my meaning. But if it’s a crime to pluck a rare word from the brink of extinction, to try to breathe new life into it, and, by doing so, to expand the minds — and word-hoards — of my readers, then I plead guilty as charged.

Here’s to new and interesting words, worlds, and columns in 2013, and to a healthy and productive New Year for us all!

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 27 December 2012

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com