We Were Connoisseurs of Synonyms, Or: Why I Use Twitter

It is easy to make light of this kind of "writing," and I mention it specifically because I do not make light of it at all: it was at Vogue that I learned a kind of ease with words [...], a way of regarding words not as mirrors of my own inadequacy but as tools, toys, weapons to be deployed strategically on a page. In a caption of, say, eight lines, each line to run no more or less than twenty-seven characters, not only every word but every letter counted. At Vogue one learned fast, or one did not stay, how to play games with words, how to put a couple of unwieldy dependent clauses through the typewriter and roll them out transformed into one simple sentence composed of precisely thirty-nine characters. We were connoisseurs of synonyms. We were collectors of verbs.

(Joan Didion, "Telling Stories," 1978)