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The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the differ ence between lightning and the lightning bug.
Since Buffon, in the “Discours sur le Style” delivered on the occasion of his admission to the Academie Francaise in 1753, declared that “le style est l'homme même,” this utterance has become a cross between a shibboleth and an axiom. Parrotlike, style is considered the yardstick of the real writer.
The trouble starts with the inability of writers and literary critics alike either to define or to agree on any definition of the term. Ex cathedra, a writer is conceded to have style only in exceptional cases. The majority of writers are upbraided because of their poor style. If the point is pressed, at best another quotation can be squeezed out, this time the Earl of Chesterfield's aphorism, “Style is the dress of thoughts.’ Which leaves us exactly where we were to begin with.
To increase the confusion, privately every writer has the greatest contempt for the style of his fellow writers. The most frequently heard objection is the ironic dictum, “Some style!”
Obviously, style is left to a judgment based on “feelings.” “Don't ask me why, that man has no style,” said a writer-patient when asked about the work of another writer. And here the matter rests, on the Procrustean bed of “don't ask me why …” Even if one penetrates beyond the “I just feel it” which is the traditional excuse of writers, one gets but a barrage of circumlocution, mostly clouding the issue with elegant phrases borrowed from notable literary people of the past. Coleridge with his now famous definition, ‘Prose