Wouldn’t I just have to eat Broca’s area? I could do that.
http://www.marymt.edu/~psychol/broca.html
Make up words.
For example, “perpacity”. Sounds familiar, right? “I just don’t have the perpacity for these things.”
It’s time for the new dictionary.
Another plug for reading books. Also magazines. Magazines are a good way to learn about an area you don’t know much about, including specialized vocabulary. For example, you might want to build your vocabulary about business, finance & investing. A word-a-day calendar generally has words about all types of poetic things that you won’t use that often.
If you didn’t do this in high school, or have forgotten, another good thing is to learn all the Latin and Greek roots that make up so many words, like “pre” means before and “chrono” means time. That will allow you to understand a lot of words even if you haven’t seen that actual word before.
IMHO Read read read.
Read some older books. I don’t think Shakespeare is going to be great for increasing your vocabulary—I mean really, if you broke out in “What light from yonder window breaks” or whatever that line is, people are gonna think you’re certifiable.
My favorite authors to read for fairly useful vocabulary words are:
[ul]Edith Wharton
Washington Irving
Daniel Defoe
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock stories)
and whoever wrote The Last of the Mohicans[/ul]
Like anything else, you can really only learn through exposure. Conversation is good, but most folks are lazy when they speak and a relatively small bank of words is used. Therefore you realy only have the printed word to help you.
Read a bunch of different stuff, but maximize the use of your time. There are a number books an edumacated person is expected to have read. Read these “classics” and you can get familiar with the tales and you’ll expose yourself to more vocabulary (and incedentally, more ideas). Subscribe to 2 or 3 magazines that cover different topics–“Discover” will get and keep you conversant in a very broad array of popular technology, “Mother Jones” will give you a hard Left-Wing slant on social and political issues and you can get the Right Wing slant from “Newsweek” to keep some balance in what you’re taking in. You can snag an article from your magazine while eating your Cheerios, read chunks of your classics on your own time, and listen to different types of music on your commute, if you can.
Like you mentioned, context is important in making the words & their meanings stick. Context means how the word is used in the writing, but it also refers to how that bit of writing fits in with your life–That’s why I’d preach variety at you, and encourage you to shuffle your car stereo radio presets on occasion.
You’d do well probably to steer away from learning vocabulary for its own sake unless you like to do party tricks like delivering little-used words that lack relevance in everyday life. You might end up accidentally appearing the clown. IMHO increased vocabulary comes from and is complemented by increased literary awareness. Ulitmately, you want to understand and be understood better than right now.
And write a lot–even if you don’t let anyone else read it. Reading without writing to reinfocrce the learning is a lot like reading up on weightlifting–doesn’t do anything meaningful for you.
"The difference between “the right word” and “almost the right word” is the difference between lightning & a lightning bug.