Don’t
Snort your Orts!
When I
was a wee lass (a better lead-in than “When I was a kid …?”) we were told to “finish
every scrap of food” on our plates, because there were “starving children in
China.”
Well,
we now know the folly of those admonitions. First, we didn’t understand the
correlation between our food and the children in China – our good fortune was
lost in the worry of not getting any pie; and sadly, there always have been and
likely always will be starving children, on every continent.
Second,
finishing everything on our plates often led to obesity – if not then, the gobbling
habit wreaked havoc on our adult years* before we realized we needed smaller plates!
On a lighter
note, can you imagine the food snorting out our noses if our parents had
exclaimed, “Young lady, you finish all the orts
on your plate, or no dessert!”
ORT(s) – n. a scrap or fragment of food left from a meal, usu. used in
plural. [WW#48]
“Usually
used in plural?” When have you usually
used that word in anything? Methinks there are thousands of words in the
dictionary that could easily be eliminated. Why saddle one meaning with three,
four, five or more words to cover it? Think about it, writers …
Repetition bores readers. They’re looking for interesting
and exciting. Overuse of a word in a sentence, paragraph, or even page, can
send the reader skimming down the text. Some discerning folks may even decide
to skip your work altogether.
Does your writing look like this? He opened the closet door just a tad, to peek into the room. There was a
tad of water on the floor where his
cup had runneth over. Oh my, mom is going to be a tad angry, he
thought. But
when mom walked into the room, she spied the water and softly called, “Teddy,
did you spill a tad of water? It’s
okay, let’s clean it up together.”
Although
I still believe we could do without words that are so archaic or rarely used
that their meaning is obscure to the majority, do vary your text to keep your
writing fresh and inviting.
Can’t
think of another word for scrap of food? Grab your thesaurus and cruise the alternatives. Morsel, crumb,
tidbit … or even tease them with orts.
But
don’t hesitate to lightly pepper your writing with fascinating, unfamiliar
terms – it just might encourage your readers to learn something new.**
* “To help the 13 million obese seniors in the U.S., the Affordable Care Act included a new Medicare benefit
offering face-to-face weight-loss counseling in primary care doctors’ offices.
Doctors are paid to provide the service, which is free to obese patients, with
no co-pay. But only 50,000 seniors participated in 2013, the latest year for
which data is available.”
** Remember, you can create an interactive eBook with links to dictionary references or other informative
sites. Rather than devalue your work by writing to a lower literacy level, think
about the prospect of creating a richer experience and enhancing readers’ education!
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