Word choice

Recently I told a friend that I'd written a new poem and the very first phrase was "Impecunious planet". He asked, "Why would you start with a word no one knows?"

He has a point. If a writer wants their work to be something any one can enter easily, slip into like a McDonalds, into the familiar, nutritionally weak but filling substance, then any word would do. The word "impoverished" would work just as well. Except that in poetry, sound matters. One might ask, "Why did Mozart use so many notes?"

The answer: My poem would not be served by the soothing "sh" and the forgiving "r" in the word "impoverished." My poem stands solidly due to the harshness of the hard "c" and the sibulent "s" sounds in "impecunious." And what risk? A reader may like the sound and not truly know the word but if they read on, the meaning may become clear or they may seek the answer by finding the word in the dictionary and saving another word from extinction. But that is not why I choose the word. I choose it as a chef chooses the right spice and a musician the right chord and a painter the right color; because it is the word that must be used; it is correct.

Todays word, delivered by word of the day, arrives just in time as I need it for what I will write later today, perhaps tonight. I think I knew this word before but I've fallen out of using it. But I am fortunate that I am reminded and just in the nick of time.

peripeteia \pair-uh-puh-TEE-uh\ noun
: a sudden or unexpected reversal of circumstances or situation
especially in a literary work

Example sentence:
In the last act of the play, the king's decision to avenge his brother
leads to a peripeteia that leaves him bereft of his throne and his family.

Did you know?
"Peripeteia" comes from Greek, in which the verb “peripiptein” means
"to fall around" or "to change suddenly." It usually indicates a turning point
in a drama after which the plot moves steadily to its denouement. In his
Poetics, Aristotle describes peripeteia as the shift of the tragic protagonist's fortune from good to bad--a shift that is essential to the plot of a tragedy. The term is also occasionally used of a similar change in actual affairs. For example, in a June 7, 2006 article in _The New York Times_, Michael Cooper described William Weld’s second term as Massachusetts’ governor as
“political peripeteia”: it “began with a landslide victory and ended with
frustrated hopes and his resignation.”