In a press release promoting a book on the same topic, Houghton Mifflin lists an arbitrary, A-to-Z inclusive 100 words every high-school grad should know. Lists like these make me cringe (and not the least because lists are laaaazy excuses for writing). I do favor an expansive knowledge of vocabulary. But it’s one thing to know these words and another to know when to use them in speech or writing. And the general answer to that is never, unless you’re a lawyer, a tweed-suited intellectual or a dead author such as Jane Austen.
For instance, there is seldom an instance where loquacious works better than either talkative or something colloquial like windy or wordy. I could make a similar point with half the words on the list: haughty for supercilious, steep for precipitous and so on. Yes, yes: there are degrees of meaning among synonyms. But I say, in general, if it’s Latinate (look for that telltale rattail, ous), one should suspect there exists an Anglicized word that works more clearly than that multisyllabic 16th-century antique.
And words like infrastructure and paradigm are so misused and overused, they should be banned from the dictionary. Or lexicon, as Houghton Mifflin would say.
In short, keep it simple, stupid.