Back in February 2004, E.J. Dionne Jr. of The Washington Post wrote about the impending presidential campaign. Dionne is among several gifted scribes in the Post’s stable of political writers. This morning he was riding a nag. He complained:

“Can’t supporters of the Bush administration think of something more original than issuing fatwas against ‘Massachusetts liberals’?”

Fatwas? A few seconds’ resort to dear old Merriam-Webster provided a translation. A fatwa is “a legal opinion or decree handed down by an Islamic religious leader.” The Random House College Dictionary adds a fact. A fatwa is a decree issued by the ulama. Pronounced OO-la-ma, an ulama is an authoritative body of Muslim scholars. The noun dates in English usage from the 1880s. You may try it on your next dinner partner.

How many readers of Dionne’s column knew the meaning of a “fatwa”? My dear wife, who is herself a columnist, guessed that 95 percent would know and the other 5 percent, except for her husband, would infer correctly. A clean sweep. I asked, rhetorically, what percentage of one’s hypothetical readers is a minimum percentage to justify a writer’s putting “fatwa” to work? She said, “It depends,” and we let it go.

Perhaps “fatwa” is a poor choice to illustrate the problem that confronts every writer every day. What do writers owe their readers? What do they owe themselves? What is the purpose of a written language anyhow? Surely it is to convey something accurately and understandably from writer to reader – some fact, some instruction, some opinion or idea, some pleasing or disgusting image, e.g., “one cable’s length is equal to 120 fathoms.” Or, “First, face the stove.” We want to be understood, don’t we? And toward that elementary end, surely we must seek a common vocabulary, for example, English instead of a Muslim tongue.

Here I’m talking about writing clear prose for the non-specialist reader. Our speech embraces a hundred jargons. Dentists have their dentin, printers their picas, tailors their tucks. A music critic reaches his audience when he reviews a “two-woman gamelan orchestra.” The Christian Science Monitor carries a feature on winter in a mackerel port; the writer speaks casually of “skerries” and “cultch.” No problem. In Architectural Digest, we find finials and oculi. A Jewish scholar remarks that “the Torah’s syntax is fundamentally additive (or paratactic).” You don’t like it? You should look it up.

Specialized vocabularies are foie gras and peacock’s tongues. Today we’re serving meat and potatoes. In The Boston Globe, a business columnist discusses writers who write about economics, among them “the famously dirigiste James Fallows.”

In The New Yorker, a scholar writes of Aldous Huxley’s “macaronic tendency to drag in untranslated quotations.” Huxley moved in a circle that embraced “the most glittering cenacle of the time, Bertrand Russell.”

In The New York Times Magazine, we read of former Speaker Newt Gingrich. He was a “Sun Belt Danton,” who fell victim “to the Thermidorian reaction of 1999.” Hey, Newt! That you?

Very well. I have notes here on “a metonym for the title character,” and “a self-styled quidnunc of the nation’s capital,” and “a tantric experience behind the wheel.” Poet William Carlos Williams used “enjambment.” In an interview in 2003, Gen. Tommy Franks said certain Iraqi threats were epiphanous. That September a CNN commentator said John Kerry could be forgiven if he feels “a little shreklekh on the eve of his kickoff jamboree.” Fourteen months later, did he again feel shreklekhier? Hard to say, hard to say.

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.