The perils of using back-formations

I'LL admit that I am rather finicky in my choice of words, rarely giving in to the temptation of using nice-sounding words of doubtful meaning or origin. When the time came for me to put together my early English-usage newspaper columns into a book, in fact, I became literally obsessive with my vocabulary. I was therefore supremely confident — "smug" is perhaps the better word — that when my first book, "English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language," finally went to press, I had tied up whatever vocabulary loose ends I might have overlooked in my original column pieces due to the pressures of newspaper deadlines.

A few weeks after the book came out, however, I got very upset when someone took issue with my use of the word "enthused" in this sentence: "In time, distracted and enthused by English-language stylists with comparable if not greater facility with prose, I gave up my search for both the writer and the book." ("Rediscovering John Galsworthy," chapter 39, page 116). The comment, which was part of an incisive post-publication critique by an extremely discerning reader, was this: "Enthused is a back-formation, one disapproved of by some careful writers/smug pedants."