A couple of years ago, well before the invasion of Iraq, Rep. Sue Myrick spoke to the Chamber of Commerce in Matthews, N.C. The local News & Record covered the story:

“Asked about Iraq, Rep. Myrick said her hope is for an internal coo.”

What say? An internal coo? Surely an internal coo would be more genteel than an external coo, but any kind of coo is friendlier than a real coup.

Yes, dear friends, we are off on our annual rant about foreign words and phrases. Skillfully employed and properly spelled, these sophisticated departures from everyday English can perk up a passage of pedestrian prose. At their best, they add a serendipitous soupcon of seasoning to the sauce. They add it, that is, if our readers understand what in the hell we are trying to say. And if our printers can spell “soupcon” with a cedilla.

The misspelling of “coup” in a small North Carolina newspaper is probably a poor example for today’s meditation. More to be censured is a writer for TV Guide who turned out a piece two years ago about Timothy Spall, a journeyman British actor. It appears that a perceptive director finally cast Spall in roles “that gave the actor such cache that other directors couldn’t ignore him.” A cache is a hiding place. If we are determined to speak of a “cachet,” we ought to spell it right.

That was a problem some months ago at the Mount Airy (N.C.) News, where a reporter discussed a burglar’s “motis operandi.” At about the same time, a paid obituary in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch noted that the deceased gentleman had graduated “cumma sum laude.” As he went to the grave his old Latin teacher cried, “Viola!”

Another thing: We especially ought to avoid foreign words that require diacritical punctuation. At about this time a year ago, a Western writer sought to wish his Spanish-speaking readers a Happy Ano Nuevo. Regrettably, he had no tildes to help him. He was wishing for something else entirely.

What is an auto-da-fe? I am not kidding. A book reviewer in The Washington Post was discussing the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times in the 1920s. “It was then a daily auto-da-fe of liberal ideas and reputations.” In context, the phrase was murkily clear: Publisher Harry Chandler did not like liberals.

Suppose the critic had scrapped that auto-da-fe. Suppose he had written instead of a daily butchering of liberal ideas, or a daily pulverizing or a daily skewering. Surely the sentence would have been more understandable to readers who had never met an auto-da-fe. Would it have been a better sentence? Tell me: Is it a writer’s proper goal always to be perfectly clear to the audience for which he is writing? If that is not a writer’s proper goal, what is?

One answer – a not very satisfactory answer – is that a writer’s only obligation is to himself, and then to his readers. Or her readers. There is something distastefully patronizing in self-consciously “writing down” to them. On the other hand, if we constantly affront our readers with words they do not comprehend, have we abandoned a writer’s purpose in favor of a writer’s self-indulgence?

Perhaps we should affront our readers only now and then. Does our sense of personal integrity require that we write always to the highest level of our skill? If only a small fraction of our readers get the point of a mot juste, so what? Tant pis! Or as we say, “scrammez vous!”

Our readers are English-speaking. This is my thought for today: As a rule, we ought to speak to them in a tongue they understand.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.