Choosing the most widely known words
The more widely known and used word often turns out to be the most precise. The more widely known word in English is likely to be one of Anglo-Saxon origin. English is, of course, made up of two major streams of language: the Germanic-based Anglo-Saxon and the Latinate strain, which arrived in England most decisively with the French in 1066. The more usually spoken English is composed strongly of the older root words; those are the ones we understand the best.
Those with English as a second language--especially if their first language is Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or French--have a special obstacle. Because of the many cognate words in English, people with Romance Languages as first languages are tempted to depend too heavily on those Latin-based cognate words. This dependence presents two problems: the cognates may not be true synonyms in the two languages, and in English the Latin-based words seem more vague and, thus, more inflated. A person studying English would do well to concentrate on the words of Anglo-Saxon origin, the words more commonly used for quick, unstudied, natural communication.
Of course, any archaic language tends to sound inflated as well. Business people, always excepting attorneys, seem finally to have given up the artifacts of the 19th Century, such artifacts as "I beg to acknowledge" or "your humble servant." Now perhaps, we have to work on the early 20th Century phrasing. Such phrases as "as per," "in re," or "above-referenced matter" seem ripe for extinction. See what you can do to promote their destruction.
Finally, some phrases seem to occur primarily in writing, hardly ever in normal, quick speech. One such phrase is "prior to," a phrase everyone understands, but a phrase carrying an idea we usually say as "before." The same goes for "subsequent to," "in lieu of," "with respect to," "as to," or "relative to." All these vague connectives should be suspect to you, especially when you get used to following the major rule of written vocabulary: use the vocabulary you'd use in speaking to the reader.
==>Guidelines ==>Inflation