Random musings of a tortured soul

I was in the process of looking up some obscure instruction manual on Sarcasm and chanced upon these quotes:

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

Clearly, both Faulkner and Hemingway had a lot of patience and the benefit of good memory to deliberate upon the use of vocabulary to communicate an idea over snail mail. This discussion begs the question, does an enriched vocabulary indeed enhance communication or should one restrict his/her vocabulary to the bare minimum required to understand an idea and be understood? Without getting into the minute details, I am of the opinion that an ever-expanding vocabulary spawns creativity. The articulation of humor, sarcasm or even an idea is a complex process. It requires one to construct a sentence meticulously with words that would allow another to gain access to one's own thought process. A diverse vocabulary requires one to select a word that accurately captures the mood that he/she is selecting without hampering the overall sound of the sentence, for it is proven that human beings are conditioned to responding to auditory cues. This effort, even if considered in isolation, fosters creativity. On the other side of the spectrum, if every idea mandated but one sentence that aptly captured the sentiment, would we not be killing all room for interpretation? The process of interpreting what the writer is trying to convey is as enriching as the satisfaction that is derived from being privy to the idea itself. In a world with no ambiguity, one is denied this satisfaction altogether. Hence, from both the writer’s perspective and that of the reader, there seems to be at least one argument to favor wrestling with ambiguity.