If I wrote a mystery—haven’t done it yet, but I might—it would be known in the trade as a “cozy.” The sleuth in a cozy won’t be an assistant coroner, an officer of the law, or a private eye. She—in a cozy it’s usually a she, though a male associate is permissible—will be a fairly ordinary person, if nosier than most, with a keen mind, active intuition, and ability to put two and two together. If her first sum happens to be three, she’ll stay the course till she makes it four. No worry if things in a cozy seem unusually coincidental, for life is full of coincidences. In a cozy, as in every other novel, plot and style and characterization matter—and especially the character at center stage.

I’d probably shape my own cozy around a book editor who rents a holiday cottage for two weeks in the English countryside, taking her widowed mother along. On their second day there, the editor (call her Amelia), venturing out to explore the neighborhood, stumbles over a corpse in an abandoned dovecote. And then the plot begins to thicken.

The cozy heroine is someone I understand, someone not unlike you or me. She could be a schoolteacher, a retired civil servant or airline attendant, but she won’t be an honest-to-God detective. She may hire a car so she and Mother can get about, but she won’t undertake a car chase, have a shootout, or search the national database for suspects. She won’t have sex during the novel either, not with Mother along. She may think about it, dream of it, get an email or mobile call from her stateside beau, but on this outing sex will not happen.

Economists talk about Gresham’s Law—in simple terms, bad money drives out good. When a country goes off the gold or silver standard in favor of paper money, many people hoard gold or silver coins. Which would excite you more, a shoebox full of paper money, or a handful of $20-gold pieces? For most of us, gold coins have more pizazz, more sparkle, and provide greater sensory pleasure.

So it is with words. When inferior language proliferates, it drives out the best. A steady diet of dumbed-down language in television reality shows, sitcoms, and news reporting makes us all too willing to settle for mediocrity rather than taking those extra steps to claim the richness our language affords. Shakespeare’s grasp of the subtleties of human behavior isn’t all that keeps his plays read, taught, and in production. The rich language of his time, which was the Bard’s stock-in-trade, also helps keep his plays alive.