Thank you, Ann. It’s good to ventilate in unison with colleagues who wear seven-league boots. At university, I had a close friend that had a little maths in the wheelhouse, who studied a paper-and-pencil psychological sentence-completion test of “ego development” — as it was assessed by sophisticated, trained evaluators — and found that the judged levels of “ego development” correlated stinkingly well with the logarithm of the written syllable-count of the answers — better than with word count or even letter count. Gosh, that's actually pretty neat!
Obviously, it was not a Freudian ego that was being charted, but the windbag ego that swells with wisdom. It’s just that everybody's upping their personal brand by padding with longer phrases in the climb for status. High “ego development”, thesaurus-rich, sentences like the first two sentences of Coleridge’s “
Kubla Khan” were privileged, low “ego development” efforts like poor Aram Saroyan’s “
lighght" were dealt disrespect. Haiku might fall in some middle bin. So people want a top kudos evaluation for “departed from” instead of the monosyllabic “fled.” Golly.