A former boss had one of those ‘word a day’ vocabulary calendars on his desk. I would look at that calendar the first thing each morning and later take note as my boss would make an awkward attempt to incorporate that word of the day into his daily speech. If June 12th was ‘tintinnabulation’ you could be pretty sure you’d hear a Poe quote or possibly a stilted description of Sunday’s church service. Either way, it made me roll my eyes :rolleyes:.
It occurred to me that I may have been unfair in judging my boss this way. After all, what’s wrong with wanting to increase one’s vocabulary? Surely, one of the best ways to ‘own’ a word is to actually use it in some sort of useful context, right? Doesn’t it stand to reason that an initial attempt to do just about anything is likely to be somewhat ham-handed?
Then again, what were his real motives for wanting to increase his vocabulary? The cynical voice in my head says it was an attempt to appear smarter in the eyes of others than he really was.
I don’t know…random internet strangers, if you encounter someone making an awkward attempt to use vocabulary that’s probably beyond their ken would you be more inclined to consider this an aspirational thing or a selfish thing?
I agree that using a word helps to cement it in my mind, but for me the main motivation for expanding my vocabulary is to improve my understanding when reading or listening. Substituting rarer words for common ones may add a little precision to spoken or written communication, but that precision is lost if the reader/hearer doesn’t know what the word means.
I applaud anyone trying to educate themselves. However some ways are more practical than others.
A more effective way to expand one’s vocabulary is to read a lot. Words will sticks with you more when you see them used in context and then come naturally when appropriate.
Tintinnabulation is a swell word but I think it may be only good for one use and Mr. Poe already redeemed that coupon.
I will say, I think reading is a far better way to improve your vocabulary. People who pick up words in isolation tend to make errors with the connotations of the word. People who learn words via reading can avoid that since the word is contextualized.
Probably not selfish, I think you’re looking for “affected”.
The funny thing is, even if one is trying to effect an affect by actively working on vocabulary, it is very likely they will in fact become more knowledgeable. If you consider the idea that there are no true synonyms, that words in English have similar but subtly different meanings & baggage, then the more words you know, the more you are exposed to managing nuance. Of course, if you’re just looking for synonyms to the words you already sling, you’ll sound like someone reading from a thesaurus and you’ll be pegged as pretentious.
Learning words that are so obscure that one never encounters them unless they are being deliberately used for their own sake (e.g. tintinnabulation) is akin to learning trivia, in that it may be interesting but it’s not terribly useful.
OTOH, there are words that are less commonly used (e.g. lucid, promulgate, imbue), but still used often enough in news articles, essays, and other works so that there is value in learning the meaning and etymology of them. Used wisely, they afford greater precision of expression by the author, and becoming familiar with such words helps you to more clearly comprehend the author’s intent and may also improve your own ability to express yourself.
I had a coworker and friend who grew up mostly poor, as her father was a blue-collar guy and she was the oldest of several kids. When she was in high school her father got a patent on some trash-collecting process and they got infused with a lot of money, so she had her teeth fixed and possibly some other stuff. She was in her early 20s when we worked together. She hadn’t gone to college, because that wasn’t the expectation when she was growing up, and she was a pretty indifferent student, apparently but she wasn’t dumb. However, her language and her fashion sense were a bit lacking. She spent a lot on clothes but usually didn’t look quite right–a little overdone, or something.
She got a crush on a guy, late 20s at the time, who was Ivy League-educated and on his way to becoming a honcho, and thought he thought she was dumb. So she wanted to improve her vocabulary to seem smarter, mainly to him, but also probably to advance in other ways. It was self-education for her, and the end was probably marrying a guy in a better class than she’d grown up with, or maybe getting a better job. So one of the things was vocabulary, and she had a book that was maybe a compilation of Reader’s Digest “How to Increase Your Word Power.” And she would use her new words on some of the female editorial staff, to make sure she got it right when she used it on The Guy. Example: “Well, Phil is kind of a caviling person, ain’t he, I mean isn’t he?” (Phil was an editor, so, yes.)
I do hope she got a better job than she had (selling classified ads over the phone) because that job is gone. In fact that whole newspaper is gone.
I could see value in actively expanding one’s vocabulary if they encounter difficulty in understanding others for lack of word knowledge.
But learning words no matter how obscure or redundant? I mean, it could be a cool hobby I guess. But it also seems like a good way to clutter your head with verbiage you can’t really do much with.
I find that having a broad vocabulary makes it MUCH easier to communicate succinctly online (uh, not here. I’m probably the mid-to-bottom of the pack when it comes to vocabulary here). Stephen Fry really took off on Twitter right away when he joined because it was easy for him to get his points across in 140-characters-or-less. I don’t use Twitter much but even on Facebook, where you can be as rambly as you want, it still makes sense to be concise but to use some bigger words for maximum impact. Granted, some people might not know what you are talking about if you use the wrong big words but that you can still get your point across. There are many words out there that people might not exactly know the meaning of but they get the gist when they see them in context.
To me it depends on how they react if corrected, or when they encounter a new word from someone else. Someone interested in improving their communication skills will appreciate the correction, be curious about the new word. Someone who thinks that using obscure words or obfuscating meanings places them above others, and who is then told to get some vestments on as his intergluteal cleft is showing, will be angry at having been discovered.
I do hope those word-a-day things have a pronunciation guide. As a lifelong voracious reader I knew a lot of words and could use them appropriately in a sentence–if I was writing. You could say I was a con-noisier of words and that’s exactly how I would have said it. How I did say it. I probably sounded like a pretentious twat when I tried these words out loud.
Other words that got me in trouble: truculent (I heard it in my head as “truce a lent”); lugubrious (oh, it’s a hard G? Okay…); renege (it’s not “ray-nezh” and it’s not spelled “re-nig”); and spa (don’t even ask). I thought “ingenuous” and “ingenious” were pronounced the same way. Yeah the list goes on.
I once had a Brit tell me he thought my idea “rather ingenuous.” I don’t think he knew I would recognize it as an insult. I wish I could say I reposted with some usage of disingenuous but I’m possessed of an unusually viscous wit.
I have it on good authority* that one of the reasons SWMBO started dating (and eventually marrying) me was my gargantuan vocabulary. Women like them large and skillfully employed…
In that when I asked she laughed and said “Sure, that’s what it was…”
