I suppose, as usual, there are reasons to go in each direction. I mean, if the question is: "Should we restrict our vocabulary to terms that everybody already knows" then there is reason to restrict ourselves, and reasons not to so, and we'll have to make the decision, I guess, individually and differently in different contexts. This kind of muddy answer seems to be the usual case. Simple universalizing answers that say one thing "is always good" and something else "is always bad" are somehow cleaner, simpler, but they seem to take us into circles, too, like telling us to always turn left. Sometimes turning left is better, sometimes turning right is better.

Reasons for restricting our vocabulary to ordinary words: If we restrict our vocabulary, I think we widen the field of people who will be interested in what we say. Most people seem to be impatient in listening to things they don't have a sense of understanding immediately.

Reasons not to restrict our vocabulary: But, if we restrict our vocabulary to ordinary words we will, I feel, limit our creativity, and we will limit our ability to inspire creativity in our listeners. I believe awakening creativity in our listeners is the most important thing for creating paralogy, the powerful kind of conversation or writing that leads in new ideas that could not have ever been imagined. This kind of writing seems to emerge best when a new language game is created and the new terms do not seem to need to need to be immediately intelligible to the average listener in order for this powerful "thing" to happen. It is no miracle to me that Derrida is very interesting to many many intellectuals even though he is largely unintelligible. Derrida created a new language game.

And creating a new language game is a very exciting thing to do. By a new language game I mean a new vocabulary that allows us to structure the world in a different way. My picture is not of our words naming a set of objects arranged before us, but of our words organizing objects into packages of meaning. One set of words packages the world one way, another set packages it another -- and the profundity is that there is NO vocabulary that escapes some kind of packaging. But once the world is packaged differently in new language, subdued voices begin to feel alive and experience their own creative impulse to speak with new ideas. Then new voices weave their way across and through the meanings of each other and a common language fabric begins to form that provides us, for a while, with a collaboratively built home of sparkling ideas. Pretty exciting.

On the other hand, one doesn't need alien sounding words like "tiotol" to do this, and maybe they sometimes get in the way. One can do it with metaphors and similes that are immediately apparent, but one needs to learn  to write like that, and it's not always easy. (I tried to do it, for example, in the last paragraph.) And, it seems to me that there are forces in the conversation that will want to snuff out colorful images and replace those with their own, for unforeseeable, and sometimes unfathomable, reasons. So, we can't be too attached to our pretty poetry, can't standardize it with the force of individual will. Learning to create paralogy together requires learning to let new words and images go, learning to yield to new forces with other agendas - for a while - and then coming back and recreating the packaging of ideas once new forces become stagnant - and they will. That is, paralogy is not built just out of new ideas. It also requires appreciation for these hidden forces that crush new ideas and a willingness to let changes emerge that could not have been forseen. These are forces in the conversation that blow in new and unpredictable ideas. They are like the winds blowing hard in different and changing directions so that they manage to keep the magic carpet of our conversation afloat a little longer.

So, good question, Riet. Should we restrict our vocabulary to ordinary words more? Maybe. Maybe. Sometimes
...Lois Shawver