5.31.2006

ordinary and rare words

What matters in writing, I think, is that the ordinary word seems to be used for the first time, and the rare one seems ordinary, so that one doesn't stumble over it and no word feels strange or wrong, wherever it is placed.

—Juan Ramon Jiménez, The Complete Perfectionist: The Poetics of Work, ed. Christopher Maurer (Doubleday, 1997), p. 147

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