Appropriate Diction
The final test of any diction is its appropriateness. The man who talks of dignified things as he would of a baseball game—unless he is doing it deliberately for humor, caricature, or burlesque—is ruining his own cause. The man who discusses trifles in the style of philosophy makes himself an egregious bore. As Shakespeare said, "Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature."
Beware of the flowery expression; avoid metaphorical speech; flee from the lure of the overwrought style. In the first place it is so old-fashioned that audiences suspect it at once. It fails to move them. It may plunge its user into ridiculous failure. In the excitement of spontaneous composition a man sometimes takes risks. He may—as Pitt is reported to have said he did—throw himself into a sentence and trust to God Almighty to get him out. But a beginner had better walk before he tries to soar. If he speaks surely rather than amazingly his results will be better. The temptation to leave the ground is ever present in speaking.
A Parliamentary debater describing the Church of England wound up in a flowery conclusion thus: "I see the Church of England rising in the land, with one foot firmly planted in the soil, the other stretched toward Heaven!"
An American orator discussing the character of Washington discharged the following.
The higher we rise in the scale of being—material, intellectual, and moral—the more certainly we quit the region of the brilliant eccentricities and dazzling contrasts which belong to a vulgar greatness. Order and proportion characterize the primordial constitution of the terrestrial system; ineffable harmony rules the heavens. All the great eternal forces act in solemn silence. The brawling torrent that dries up in summer deafens you with its roaring whirlpools in March; while the vast earth on which we dwell, with all its oceans and all its continents and its thousand millions of inhabitants, revolves unheard upon its soft axle at the rate of a thousand miles an hour, and rushes noiselessly on its orbit a million and a half miles a day. Two storm-clouds encamped upon opposite hills on a sultry summer's evening, at the expense of no more electricity, according to Mr. Faraday, than is evolved in the decomposition of a single drop of water, will shake the surrounding atmosphere with their thunders, which, loudly as they rattle on the spot, will yet not be heard at the distance of twenty miles; while those tremendous and unutterable forces which ever issue from the throne of God, and drag the chariot wheels of Uranus and Neptune along the uttermost path-ways of the solar system, pervade the illimitable universe in silence.
Of course, today, nobody talks like that. At least no one should.