Above and Beyond

Dear Reader,

Since law school, I have made it a goal to strip my writing and speech of unnecessarily fancy, obscure, and multisyllabic words. Speak and write as simply as possible; don’t send readers scurrying for the dictionary, like writer George Will does, as I once good-naturedly criticized him on the Stay Tuned podcast.

I’m going to violate that resolution here because a couple of particularly fancy seven-syllable words have been banging around in my brain this past week, terms I played with and whose meaning I explored, in the academic abstract, way back in college when studying moral philosophy. They are the adjective “supererogatory” and its noun counterpart “supererogation.” Despite the sound of it, the latter has nothing to do with the watering of crops.