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Vocabulary and other subtle acts of learning.
Where do we learn vocabulary, after they stop giving us spelling tests in third grade? I know now that many people cram for the language portion of the SAT -- I would have scored higher if I'd thought of that. I am especially interested in where we pick up the subtlety of English, which often has dozens of words in various categories. It's why a real thesaurus is so useful -- it's like a sliding scale of notes.
I have had a lot of odd language changes in my brain, with the problems my condition has caused. I don't always trust my own choice of vocabulary. So when a sentence like this comes out in the novel:
She decided his comment wasn’t a question so much as a supposition. Therefore, she didn’t have to answer it.
I suddenly stop and think: "Can I use ‘supposition’ like this?"
And I go to an on-line dictionary to see if it can give me any insight, or if I need to dig out the magnifying glass and hit the Oxford Abridged. As it happened, one of the on-line dictionaries assures me I can do this -- and a second one does, as well. But this is not the first usage of the word. And I use second, third, fourth place definitions a lot. I drive copy editors nuts with this -- as in the infamous copy editor who wanted to know why I was throwing chemistry into a description passage that talked of the winds tearing through a high mountain area being so cold that the ice sublimated.
A very rude geek at the first place I worked once caught me flat-footed on vocabulary. Since then, I almost always check, and I'm almost always right -- but not always.
Granted, I read tons when I was growing up. I read everything on my level and multiple grades above my level, finally having to resort to classical mysteries to satisfy my story lust. And I only slowly added in classics. I had no interest in flowery writing just for the sake of flowers, nor in characters that learned nothing in the time I spent with them. One of a cast of characters learning nothing, fine -- but I wanted story, and story is what moves genre novels. And story is followed by character, of course. Some of the characters had to learn from the story, or how would I learn from the story? (Or so I now suspect was my reasoning.)
Spare elegance in writing I admire, and I almost always try to use as few words as possible to paint the scene I want. Which is why word choice can be critical. Sometimes one word substitutes for a sentence -- or a paragraph. Or even an entire short story, that will never be tacked onto the one you just finished writing.
It's these lesser usages of words I find intriguing. Clearly, I learned something in my childhood journey that taught me to look for subtle meanings in sentences. I'm grateful I'm recovering some of that ability. But was it just me? Do all kids in the XXX group start looking sideways at the world like that? Do you, my writing peers -- was this also your story, and is it something you do to this day?
It’s something I have wondered about before, but I’ve never asked others for their own journey into words.
When I was 12 or 13, I spent $60 for The New International Webster’s dictionary, the biggest I could find, because I kept finding words that were not in the household dictionary. We had a decent collegian dictionary; it was more than adequate for most reading households. I’d ask my mother about a word, and she’d say: “Look it up.” Sometimes, that was a nightmare, since the word was spelled nothing like it was pronounced. (We had Vice-Principal Pzybypz, or something like that, pronounced “sheevish.” I knew this game well.) At other times, it wasn’t in the dictionary. Then I asked Mom, and she’d try to give me the sense of a word. It never occurred for me to ask for a dictionary that size as a gift, and I’d purchased it at a rate today that would be eye-popping – as in very expensive video games or software.
Words were my work. I didn’t expect gifts in my work.
Then I found Mom’s thesaurus. Joy! I kept it in my room until my mother told me this wasn’t a rare book, and I could have one of my very own. Then that one went back with the collegiate dictionary, and I got my own thesaurus. It was the window to those invisible bridges I knew were just hanging out in space – and I needed a magic word to cross safely.
I still remember how horrified I was to find an alphabetical thesaurus. Gag.
So, any other thoughts on this? Surely it can’t be because my astrological sign is the crab, forever creeping sideways.
One last thing -- the weird thing about rarer usages of a word is -- where did I see this and figure it out?
Back to work.
I have had a lot of odd language changes in my brain, with the problems my condition has caused. I don't always trust my own choice of vocabulary. So when a sentence like this comes out in the novel:
She decided his comment wasn’t a question so much as a supposition. Therefore, she didn’t have to answer it.
I suddenly stop and think: "Can I use ‘supposition’ like this?"
And I go to an on-line dictionary to see if it can give me any insight, or if I need to dig out the magnifying glass and hit the Oxford Abridged. As it happened, one of the on-line dictionaries assures me I can do this -- and a second one does, as well. But this is not the first usage of the word. And I use second, third, fourth place definitions a lot. I drive copy editors nuts with this -- as in the infamous copy editor who wanted to know why I was throwing chemistry into a description passage that talked of the winds tearing through a high mountain area being so cold that the ice sublimated.
A very rude geek at the first place I worked once caught me flat-footed on vocabulary. Since then, I almost always check, and I'm almost always right -- but not always.
Granted, I read tons when I was growing up. I read everything on my level and multiple grades above my level, finally having to resort to classical mysteries to satisfy my story lust. And I only slowly added in classics. I had no interest in flowery writing just for the sake of flowers, nor in characters that learned nothing in the time I spent with them. One of a cast of characters learning nothing, fine -- but I wanted story, and story is what moves genre novels. And story is followed by character, of course. Some of the characters had to learn from the story, or how would I learn from the story? (Or so I now suspect was my reasoning.)
Spare elegance in writing I admire, and I almost always try to use as few words as possible to paint the scene I want. Which is why word choice can be critical. Sometimes one word substitutes for a sentence -- or a paragraph. Or even an entire short story, that will never be tacked onto the one you just finished writing.
It's these lesser usages of words I find intriguing. Clearly, I learned something in my childhood journey that taught me to look for subtle meanings in sentences. I'm grateful I'm recovering some of that ability. But was it just me? Do all kids in the XXX group start looking sideways at the world like that? Do you, my writing peers -- was this also your story, and is it something you do to this day?
It’s something I have wondered about before, but I’ve never asked others for their own journey into words.
When I was 12 or 13, I spent $60 for The New International Webster’s dictionary, the biggest I could find, because I kept finding words that were not in the household dictionary. We had a decent collegian dictionary; it was more than adequate for most reading households. I’d ask my mother about a word, and she’d say: “Look it up.” Sometimes, that was a nightmare, since the word was spelled nothing like it was pronounced. (We had Vice-Principal Pzybypz, or something like that, pronounced “sheevish.” I knew this game well.) At other times, it wasn’t in the dictionary. Then I asked Mom, and she’d try to give me the sense of a word. It never occurred for me to ask for a dictionary that size as a gift, and I’d purchased it at a rate today that would be eye-popping – as in very expensive video games or software.
Words were my work. I didn’t expect gifts in my work.
Then I found Mom’s thesaurus. Joy! I kept it in my room until my mother told me this wasn’t a rare book, and I could have one of my very own. Then that one went back with the collegiate dictionary, and I got my own thesaurus. It was the window to those invisible bridges I knew were just hanging out in space – and I needed a magic word to cross safely.
I still remember how horrified I was to find an alphabetical thesaurus. Gag.
So, any other thoughts on this? Surely it can’t be because my astrological sign is the crab, forever creeping sideways.
One last thing -- the weird thing about rarer usages of a word is -- where did I see this and figure it out?
Back to work.