[teucris]

The Spaniard, known to change his moods on a whim, himself declared: “After Altimara, all is decadence.”

> And the whole point of "fancy words" are to succinctly convey some nuance rather than using a generic word which is much broader.

Which can be bad when you want your audience to understand you without significant effort. Reading a novel, a reader may be willing, or excited even, to expend effort to get all the nuances and context. But if you’re writing to communicate an idea, you have to match the expectations of your audience, and your audience may have a fixed effort budget to spend on your writing. Most people know this deal, which is why I think using big words is looked down on as self-absorbed or conceited.

I think similarly about code one-liners: they are super hard for another programmer to read, and not everyone has time for that. So they tend to come off as a kind of elitist bragging if not done carefully.

[PhasmaFelis]

> The Spaniard, known to change his moods on a whim, himself declared: “After Altimara, all is decadence.”

That's even worse. It does nothing to fix the "nobody talks like this" problem if you care about that, and it's as awkward as replacing, I dunno, "He picked up a vermilion coat" with "He picked up a coat the red-orange of mercury sulfide pigment."

If you were writing a technical document, then you'd chop out the whole epithet and just say "Picasso." But that sentence clearly isn't from a technical document, but from a piece where a poetic turn of phrase is more appropriate.

[texaslonghorn5]

If you're writing for an audience familiar with the word mercurial then saying mercurial conveys exactly what the author meant.

If you're writing for an audience unfamiliar with mercurial then what you said is appropriate.

As is with a one liner, you wouldn't put that into a tutorial but you might include it without description in a CppCon talk.