The Case for and Against Elegant Variation

In a new article in the New Yorker, Naaman Zhou runs down the pros and cons of what writers call “elegant variation.”

The Case Against
The Fowlers, whose early attempts to codify English are still followed by many sticklers, coined “elegant variation” sarcastically and described it as “false elegance” and “cheap ornament.” On Wikipedia, you’ll find an instructive essay titled “The Problem With Elegant Variation.” “Elegant variation distracts the reader, removes clarity, and can introduce inadvertent humor or muddled metaphors,” it says. Or, as the Fowler brothers put it, in 1906, “These elephantine shifts distract our attention from the matter in hand.”

The Case For
According to Kristen Syrett, a professor of linguistics at Rutgers University, people are instinctively drawn to elegant variation, or “second mentions,” because of a well-documented concept called the repeated-name penalty. This is a cognitive phenomenon, part of the way human minds process language. “If I say to you, ‘Jane walked into the living room, Jane picked up a book, Jane started to read the book’... that causes a delay in reading time,” Syrett said. Indeed, psycholinguists have conducted experiments with eye-tracking technology, where they watch the eyes of their subjects stumbling over these names and scanning back. The body stutters. This response, Syrett said, is “encoded in our brain” — it applies as much to Japanese as it does to Spanish.