Welcome back, folks, to Ask Mr. Writing Person, from a very lengthy hiatus. This probably won't happen again, because the only reason we can talk to Mr. Writing Person is that he somehow snuck onto a computer with Internet access. What follows is a cleaned-up chat log of his conversation with Fred Vassal, from French Lick, Indiana.

Q. Hi there.

A. Greetings, dear Philistine. Please be quick, for I do not know when the doctors will come looking for me.

Q. Okay. I have this really great word I just learned, and I want to use it in a story. I'm wondering if you could check it to make sure I've got it right.

A. Squirt me an excerpt, then.

Q. A what?

A. An excerpt: a fragment--a short piece taken from your text.

Q. Oh. I thought you meant something gross. Anyway, here it is:

Gertrude stood with weapons akimbo, staring down the terrorist.

A. I see your problem. Nobody knows what to call them anymore. Reuters has been calling them "freedom fighters," and "the dudes on our side," and Fox News has been calling them "minions of the wicked one" and "spawn of the evil dead".

Q. No, no, I mean the word "akimbo". It means "bent outward, away from the body".

A. Well, in that case, you've got it right.

Q. Really? Great. Thanks.

A. But we don't stop there. The reason you'd use an exotic word like "akimbo" is that you want to impress the pants off anybody who happens across that passage. You want a potential customer in the bookstore to turn to that page, read "Gertrude stood with weapons akimbo," and drool all over the book, so that, having reduced its retail value, he has to buy it. You want a word that reaches out of the pages and vellicates the hearts and minds of everyone who so much as glances at it!

Q. I do?

A. Yes! And "akimbo" is the perfect word for that, so you should milk it for all it's worth. Can you squirt me the next part of that passage?

Q. I guess so.

Gertrude stood with weapons akimbo, staring down the terrorist. The terrorist's thumb twitched over the button menacingly. Gertrude gestured warningly with the muzzle of her pistol.

"Helmut!" she shouted. "Get your butt over here!"

A. That's it?

Q. Yeah. I'm still working on it.

A. Well, we'll see what my beastly creative mind can do for it. Ah, here we are:

Gertrude stood with weapons akimbo, staring down the terrorist. The terrorist's thumb was also akimbo, and it twitched over the button menacingly. Gertrude gestured warningly with the muzzle of her pistol, which, as we already mentioned, was akimbo.

"Akimbo!" she shouted. "Get your butt over here!"

Akimbo arrived, shuffling along like a penitent...

Q. You renamed one of my characters to "Akimbo".

A. Exactly. What better way to reinforce the awesomeness of a word than to name a character after it? I, myself, have a character in a recent publication named "Vellicate".

Q. Really.

A. Yes. Also, you might consider renaming Gertrude to "Lara Croft". She's fairly akimbo.

Q. She's trademarked.

The problem I would have is that akimbo has changed in definition in the last few years. Traditionally, I believe it only referred to hands and arms, a specific stands with hands on hips. (And yes, it's much easier to just say "Hand and hips", rather than Akimbo.)

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Traditionally, I believe it only referred to hands and arms

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Mr. Writing Person, as always, is brilliant. And you can quote me on that.

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Um, yeah. Anyway, my point was, if you're going to use an unusual word (that is, one that appears with low frequency in literature, let alone conversation), you only get it once. Readers aren't lovers of words in the singular sense, but in the plural sense: they like to see them put together well, not used for the sake of using them.

I didn't come across this first with "arms akimbo," but with "meandering rivulets". The sad truth is that rivulets get to meander, and arms get to be akimbo, and an internal organ gets to be vellicated, a maximum of once per novel. You're pushing it to even use the uncommon word once more. Our brains, which are accustomed to seeing a Zipf-like distribution of words, are going to cry shenanigans. "This is unlikely English!" they'll say - and a good statistical language model would actually back them up.

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The golden orb....

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