With a Techological Boost, How To Keep It Simple and Not Sound Stupid

A new text-editing widget has thrown down a gauntlet to advocates of simple writing, and gone viral on Twitter. What part of that don’t you understand

Quite a lot actually, if you’re the widget in question. Ever since a British scientist posted his Up-Goer Five text editor online, people have been seeing if they can explain subjects from string theory and evolution to Shakespeare and Tammy Wynette using only the 1,000 most commonly used words in English. Those include “aunt,” “computer,” “interrupt,” and “obviously,” but apparently not “text,” “editing,” “widget,” “gauntlet,” “advocates,” “viral” and â€" at least not yet â€" “Twitter.”

Theo anderson, a geneticist at the Sanger Institute near Cambridge and the widget’s creator, told the New Scientist that the project was inspired by a comic explaining the workings of a space rocket with only commonly used words. “I found it very funny and thought it would be interesting to try to describe my research like that,” he said. (He studies bioluminescence, a word that â€" along with “plant” and “glow” â€" is not on the list.)

Hundreds of other people have followed suit, with results (gathered on Facebook, blogs and a Tumblr) that can sound like awkward cocktail chatter between graduate students in science and visiting Martians, or maybe members of the college football team. Take Richard Carter’s précis of Darwini! an evolution:

“All the animals and green things we see in the world… have all been made by the same, fixed easy steps acting all around us. These easy steps, taken in the largest sense, being growing and having babies; being like your parents (but not exactly like them); and being able to avoid dying for as long as possible.”

Since the original widget went online, Mr. Sanderson has added a version that color codes words according to how common they are, and the geology blog Highly Allochthonous has wondered whether the art world isn’t even more in need of a radical vocabulary reduction diet.

But if 1,000 words seems like a starvation regimn, consider Basic English, a simplified language introducing by the linguist and philosopher Charles Kay Ogden in 1930 as a means of promoting not just greater mutual comprehension but world peace.

In a 1944 article in Harper’s Magazine, the linguist Rudolf Flesch argued that the strictures â€" which inspired the Newspeak in George Orwell’s “1984” â€" made the language even harder to understand. “It’s not basic,” Flesch wrote, “and it’s not English.”

It does, however, survive. Simple English Wikipedia, a version of the online encyclopedia encouraging users to stick to various limited word lists, currently includes some 100,000 articles.