I should just say, after "thank you SR", re the opening post, that Oxbridge education, for all its crusty deficiencies, did not involve an over-use of pabulum, declivity, or moue, a word whose meaning I first gleaned from reading PG Wodehouse when I should have been reading Sir Philip Sidney at college. In tutorials and lectures, dons tended to express themselves in very simple language, I always found - not, I felt, to dumb down or because they themselves were unsophisticated, but out of a desire to communicate and perhaps to demonstrate that the concepts they put forward did not need to be shrouded in obfuscation but could stand the test of "plainspeak" without their complexity being compromised.

As for Self, I always said he'd never use an everyday word like everyday when the word "quotidian" would do. I had to review his last novel. "Quotidian" makes its first appearance within about 50 pages. I suspect his motives are mixed; to celebrate and retrieve the more neglected, elegant corners of the language - and to show off.