Sometimes, the right word or words are important from a practical standpoint too: To keep down that all-important page count. If you can condense a four-line description down to three, go for it. Regarding Myq's joke, moving the hyphen is pretty funny too: Lady-feet bottoms sounds related to Man Hands.

CJ, this is quite true, too. Reminds me of the recent post I did about Trimming Tricks of the Trade. Actually I think Twitter has helped me on that front, really have to focus word choice with a 140 characters max.

I think this also speaks to knowing what kind of story you're working on. The kind of prose in the above example works because it's in a family drama, but if you were to try and write that way in a spy story or a hardboiled crime story, it would come off as false. So word choice, genre, voice, tone, all of it is tied together.

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Agreed, Alex. Your observation speaks to that concept of Narrative Voice we've been talking about here a few times in the last couple of weeks: Genre + Style = Narrative Voice.