The Art of Not Squandering a Vocabulary
Swallow a dictionary but don’t belch the words
Most of us resident Indians are multilingual in response to our socio-cultural circumstances. I happen to speak four languages as part of my response — English, Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati — and am learning to wield a fifth: Spanish.
Yet, it is the simplest of paradoxes how you can be the most comfortable with one particular language but, when the pressure mounts, also find yourself at a loss for well-placed palabras in the same language.
There you go.
I could have said “…well-placed lexical articulation”, but the word for “word” in Spanish popped into my head quicker than the more convoluted English phrasing.
If this happens to you, I empathize deeply.
Facing a paucity of appropriate words can be an issue when you are part of a conversation, or if you are writing a quality page or two. I really think, though, that sometimes this virtual barricade between a sentence that is forming on your tongue and the words that lie shrouded in the folds of your mind is quite the essential tool for building a vocabulary.
Look at it this way: forgetting words is surely not an indication of a vocabulary construction well underway, but it is a glimmer of opportunity for going the extra mile to develop an even sharper, incisive vocabulary.
It is the moment to swallow a dictionary.
First, some ground rules. The common English phrase “swallowed a dictionary” is a great compliment. Never assume otherwise. Do you know how difficult it is to stuff even the diminutive Oxford Pocket Dictionary into your oral cavity? I do. I have tried it. Mine was getting long in the tooth — and the soul. (Sorry, the Tool reference was just right there.) Its desiccated pages were crumbly and tasted inky in a wispy way, but it had aged like good cheese.
I suggest you try one as well. On the way, you’ll learn some good lessons about the generous application of figurativeness.
Second, I want to be, if not instructive, then at least prescriptive about how to employ a vocabulary once you have built it in this incremental manner:
Learn to not use it.
How we learn words
To the lay person, learning words is like picking rare and peculiar seashells for a home museum with a friend when all you really know is to spot specular reflections on tiny objects on the beach. Typically, we’ll spot a new one and ask our friend if it makes sense for the museum., i.e. look it up in the dictionary. She might say yes. We’ll then happily throw it in her box of seashells. (She does sometimes sell them by the shore, in case you were wondering.) We make a mental note of its peculiarity for posterity’s sake and move on to the next one.
There are, of course, many other more or less abstract, quantitative, or structured mechanisms to build a great vocabulary. It is not my intention to recommend or dismiss any of these here. It would take me days on end to simply review all the content that turns up for “build vocabulary”. I will simply build on what already comes before this, drawing from my own experience, some of which I believe to be relatively unique and all of which I know to be absolutely helpful.
For instance, instead of asking if, it might be more useful to ask our friend how a particular shell makes sense for the seashell museum, how it relates to other shells, what might it explain. If you listen intently to her answer, you will have an exceedingly good chance of remembering many of the peculiar shells.
Now, Norman Lewis is an evergreen rockstar in some circles of course. But there is loads of good advice out there. I recently saw Devin Gleeson provide a great guide to developing a personal lexicon, but only for those who are in it for the long haul. But among the surfeit of vocabulary-building advice, very few might tell you how not to use it.
Step 1: Build a vocabulary
The typical advice is to read wide and read deep. But as you dive into your area of interest, be it literature, journalism, poetry, non-fiction, or humour, use these 5 pointers to customize your learning experience. If you’ve done so, then you can begin to not squander your vocabulary by using it.
The last of these 5 points is something I have done myself, and it has been a defining method for my own writing and vocabulary.
1. Context
Language is not a static artefact of human civilization, but is a dynamic model of it. Its benevolent artifice extends beyond the construction of morphemes to manifest a variety of phenomena and circumstances as we perceive them. In other words, contextual variety. A single word may function as a placeholder for different meanings in different contexts. Being able to make this fine distinction is a large part of building a vocabulary.
2. Pursuing etymology is an interesting way to learn about the world
The roots of words and their development over history offers interesting avenues for learning the language too. Google search results have already gone beyond what a dictionary can cough up at a second’s notice — they provide etymological origins and usage over time among other useful metrics.
3. Learn other languages
Learn Latin phrases (perhaps even learn the Latin language, Romance languages such as French, or Germanic languages such as German). Read prose and poetry in these languages alongside their translations. You will pick up a gem here and there.
4. Web of language
Maintain a web or network or mind map of words, phrases, etc. in relation to each other. Exempli gratia, write a ‘difficult’ word, the meaning of which you have reviewed. Then, beside it, find and write equally difficult words that are alike in meaning. Proceeding accordingly, you may end up with:
captious / censorious / cavilling
all of which mean ‘hypercritical’ or ‘fault-finding’. When you begin this practice, you may wish to include a simpler synonym at the end for your later reference. But in this personal web of words, you must progress to the point where you know and retain the true nuance of the meaning of these words, because a slightly more difficult word will almost never mean exactly the same thing as its simpler synonym.
Do the same for antonyms, phrases, etc. Use your preferred note-taking app, or MS Excel, or anything really. (Doing this digitally has obvious benefits.) Remember to navigate this web routinely — treat it as your personal enchiridion. It’s particularly easy to remember to do so if you’re a writer, because you will be in need of specificity quite often.
5. Read a dictionary like any other book
No need for a double-take; you read that right. Put down your phone, magazine, newspaper, novel, or book, and pick up a dictionary to read. Don’t just read with a dictionary; read just the dictionary.
I often ponder over how the absolute structure in which information is presented makes it better or worse suited for a particular type of consumption. The development of fast search algorithms means that online dictionaries allow you to type in the word that you’re looking for, while the site displays a few others as interesting links. This is a very efficient design for getting to the answer quickly. But if you really want to build a vocabulary, your problem statement itself must be different.
Thumbing through a physical dictionary forces you to parse what the computer would otherwise have parsed for you. You will have to scour some 2–3 pages to find your word of choice via alphabetical search. And this manual search is what bestows you with a great gift: exposure.
You will passively consume some of these words, which later will start looking like words you’ve seen before but probably don’t know the full meaning of. And then of course someone will use it while talking, spookily in the same week that you first read it. Fecund grounds.
Some of these words will pique your interest, and you might take a layover at these words before moving on to your destination word. Isn’t there a direct benefit here?
Now imagine that, instead of opening a dictionary only when you want to look for a word, you wake up every morning, coffee in hand, and you open the dictionary to browse the “news” (new words). Both the benefits I cited above will now be available actively and simultaneously, at a much, much greater fidelity!
I have read the dictionary in just this way when I was a school-going kid, and I am the happier for it. (Note to self: take some time out to do it these days.) If you think that reading a dictionary outright amounts to obnoxious nerdy behaviour, remember that exposure to new concepts makes you cool. And reading a dictionary is among the best ways to achieve this problem statement efficiently.
Step 2: Don’t use it
CUT TO: One year later.
INT. HOME OFFICE — Day
He sits at his desk and attempts to complete the conclusion of his essay. He refers to his personal enchiridion for a good word or two to add a final flourish. He thinks to himself:
(a) If he uses the words often, it will lead him to forget them less frequently.
(b) If he uses the words from his personal arsenal often, it will help him understand them better.
Imagine Language, roped in as the lead actor in its own biopic, reading this screenplay. It speaks subtly about the true ways in which humans actually learn and advance language, in seeming defiance of forethought and the value of communication design. How devastated would Language be! It will certainly lament the relative lack of reasoning employed in the furtherance of Language’s cause.
People learn and employ language for almost selfish and short-term reasons. While there is no absolute fallacy in doing so, the emergent outcome of individual-centric approaches is the high probability of degrading the integrity of the structure of language over the long term.
Of course, some part of it is what leads to the ineludible evolution of language. But language should serve the purpose of retaining the meaning of concepts based on human perception so that they may be communicated appropriately.
Using words everywhere for almost-selfish reasons not only erodes Language in the long run, but denies us the opportunity to relearn.
The typical advice is to use the words that you’ve learned as frequently as possible. You might use them correctly and validate your learning, or make errors and learn from them. But this approach is good for the problem statement of increasing retention in our individual minds.
A better problem to pose to yourself is not just to retain the words in memory longer, but to learn how to use lexical complexity to the intended effect. Don’t use words for flourish alone. Use them to communicate with your audience. Use them to educate your audience, either subtly or explicitly. Doing so will sometimes require you to not use the vocabulary that you have worked hard to build. It will require you to learn not to squander it.
Also, as you build your vocabulary, you will undoubtedly forget what you learned. You may forget the words or you may forget what they mean exactly. When this happens, don’t just look them up in the dictionary and use them at the first opportunity.
When you forget, take the opportunity to re-learn. Go over the many definitions, synonyms, usages, and etymology again. Strengthen the connections in your memory, not the item itself. For words or phrases that you forget, make it a point to not use them to short effect.
There is no urgency to prove your vocabulary to the world. But it is surely exigent to keep the logic of language alive.
Now you know how to contribute — by not using it sometimes.
About the author
Sarang Deshpande is an engineer, founder [Flow Mobility; Cambio Motion], and writer. Besides spending time solving challenges in the urban mobility domain, he regularly writes about science, tech, business, and life (sometimes). He is an editor at World In Mind, a new publication which brings cutting-edge research to students and working professionals: important research across industries will set the tone for humanity’s future trajectory, and young humans would do well to keep the world in mind when they choose their area of professional focus.
