Joe, I agree completely. There are instances wherein only a particular word will suffice and nothing else will cut the muster. Unfortunately, there are many people who wouldn’t know how to use a dictionary (if they even own one!) for anything more intellectually stimulating than squashing spiders.

I suppose the issue becomes what we, as writers, are seeking to accomplish. If we’re writing to convey information to readers on an intellectual level equal to our own, then we should use whatever words the work needs to do the job; if we’re writing for children, farm animals, or dullards then we must “dumb down” our vocabulary accordingly, lest we leave our readers in the dust. Neglecting to follow this simple equation will likely lead us to failure.

I tend to be a bit verbose in my writing, I think, and certainly use some wording that would have been more at-home in a previous generation. I don’t think I’m wrong for doing so, because I get my point across, convey the information I wish to transmit, and entertain my readers (many of which are intelligent and discerning persons [after all, look whose work they're reading hahaha] and aren’t derailed by my word choices)…and at the same time I’m enjoying what I do, which makes it a solid-gold win-win situation for me.

Azmanar’s comment about the man who wrongly used the word “crucial” is something I commonly witness here in Asia. (I laughed when I read that!;))

On a side note, I was in a cafe and there was a chinese lady talking to an Arab tourist. She said, “I never talk chinese one. Cantonese, mandarin I dono one. I just speaking english one.” I understand that she was trying to impress the tourist with her English skills, by perhaps pretending that she only speaks English (in asia, somehow if you only speak English and don’t know how to speak your mother tongue, it shows that you are of a higher ’status’) but I just had to laugh hard when I heard what she said.

Sorry for the long rant!