Is there ‘lexical dark matter’ in your copy?

Also, how to let writers down easy when you’re editing them, why we use short words, and a look at what made Ray Bradbury great.

Using undictionaried words. Occasionally, writers with the strongest vocabularies put a new spin on a word to evoke the right meaning. A former editor-in-chief for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press explores this phenomenon in The New York Times. “It may seem that the hundreds of thousands of words available in traditional dictionaries would be more than enough for anything you could want to express, but experience shows us that there’s always room for one more word, as long as it’s in the right place at the right time.” Read the full story here.