The word “perforce” does not belong in YA

[conuly]

I don’t care if it is in character, pick another word! (And while it ought to be in character, she hasn’t exactly been dropping the big words every other dialog line. Or if she has, I didn’t notice?)

Comments

[ethelmay]

I can certainly imagine all sorts of novels, including many for adults, where it would be out of place to use "perforce," and I am sure you are correct about this one, but I don't think I'd ever say it was out of line only because a novel was YA. In fact I would go so far as to say that there ought to be some YA novels using that level of vocabulary.

[dewline]

Seconding this. When I was a "young adult", I was devouring dictionaries almost literally. If I could have browbeaten my parents into getting the World Book Dictionary - when it existed, it was a two-volume behemoth - I would have.

[ndrosen]

When I was twelve and thirteen years old (the target age for “young adult”) fiction, I read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Solzhenitsyn’s The Cancer Ward, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Turgenev’s Father and Sons, and, I will admit, other books less admired by literary types than those.

I think that I was in fourth grade when I read a work of fiction (it was about a whaling voyage) that the cover described as “For young adults.” Not being familiar with the marketing term, I wondered whether young adults read different books from older adults, or something like that.

[kyrielle]

Same. There are a lot of YA novels where it would be out of place, but not all of them. I could use some more middle-grade and YA works that had vocabulary, actually; the lexile level for my youngest has the system recommending The Decameron, or The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Which is not to youngest's current interests at all, but did give us a good chuckle.

[dorchadas]

Assassins are evil in alignment (perforce, as the killing of humans and other intelligent life forms for the purpose of profit is basically held to be the antithesis of weal).
AD&D 1e Player's Handbook

Maybe she's just a D&D nerd?