Jerry Friedman
[JM: Forty years ago, in Rio to speak good
English meant avoiding most Latinate terms and stick to the
Anglo-Saxon.] I hope you're joking!...
Just in case anybody picks up false
impressions from Jansy's teachers, both "rich" and "wealthy" are from
Anglo-Saxon, and "hand-made" is almost the opposite of "manufactured". In line
with what Stan says, English has many pairs of synonyms in which one is natural
and the other can sound pretentious (Shade's two examples--"naked" and "nude",
"sweat" and "perspiration"*--as well as "buy" and
"purchase", "storm" and "tempest", etc.), and in many of those the natural one
is from Anglo-Saxon and the pretentious one is from Latin, often through
French. But etymology isn't an infallible guide...
[JM: When I started to read Nabokov I was in for a big
surprise] Nabokov
(like Shade) seems to have chosen words based on many considerations that were
at least as important as naturalness to ordinary speakers
and etymology; Jerry Friedman isn't
blond...
JM: I used to be the (not "holo-") typical blonde and,
YES, the parenthetic remark is a joke (tease) inspired on "pig/pork" - but
not the report about the strict discipline which encouraged students
to avoid false-cognates or lapse into the equivalents of Spanglish or
Franglais.
The example you picked for "manufactured is almost the
opposite of hand-made" reminds me that it once landed me in a spot. I'd
read in "Time Magazine" a blurb announcing the discovery that "iron is
manufactured in the stars." So... I wrote to the Editors
to congratulate them for bringing up a proof that there is life, of
the featherless Homo Faber kind, in the cosmos... only to get a
(well-deserved and duly manuscripted?) reprimand.
Thanks for bringing up Shade's examples and for noting
that Nabokov's choices considered "naturalness to ordinary speakers and
etymology." I agree with you: there's always a thrill when one
realizes the aptness of VN's "fitting choices" that manage
to blend "naturalness" to unexpected and magic (so it seems
to me) originality.
.......................................................................
* - Retrieved from a google-source (http://www.city-data.com/forum/elections/:) Orson
Welles, about his wife Rita Hayworth, on the set of Lady from Shanghai.
The director of photography told him Rita was sweating and it was visible on the
film. Orson said sternly, "Horses sweat. Men perspire. Miss Hayworth
glows."