I’ve always had a slightly offbeat vocabulary.
On occasion this probably gives the impression that I’m behaving like a pompous prat. But honestly, more often than not it’s just down to bad wiring.
When I’m in conversation with another human being, and find a word on the tip of my tongue, my brain frequently seems to block the pathway to the most obvious descriptor. Instead, it grasps for an obscure alternative.
I stand there for an extra half-second before blurting out the only word that comes to mind – mellifluous, chastening, discordant.
People think I’m being a pretentious arse, when I’m just being me. Maybe that’s the same thing.
On one occasion, I asked a plumber what he found objectionable about the approach my wife and I were proposing for the installation of a new boiler. He squinted back at me as though I’d just handed him a lobster telephone, and my spouse hastily intervened to clarify things.
“You can’t say things like that,” she muttered a short while later. “People are going to think you’re taking the piss.”
Expanding my vocabulary with unusual words has been a compulsion for decades. This linguaphile tendency is doubtless at the root of my fascination with mistranslations.
So where did this terrible affliction begin? Blame a youthful obsession with audiobooks.
Let’s Get Metaphysical
I spent a good chunk of my youth listening to cassette audiobooks. Readings from A A Milne, Richmal Crompton, Robert C O’Brien, and Penelope Lively were particular favourites.
A love of audiobooks has two major effects on vocabulary.
The first is that you hear a word pronounced aloud, correctly. And if an audiobook is good enough, you’ll listen again and hear it again. It starts to cement itself in your mind.
One happy afternoon in my youth, I was in my bedroom listening to a Chivers Audio Book of The Starlight Barking, Dodie Smith’s batshit-crazy sequel to The One Hundred and One Dalmatians. I was under 10 at this point.
Puzzled by a line of dialogue, I wandered into the kitchen and asked my parents what ‘metaphysical’ meant. (One of the easier questions a child might have after experiencing Smith’s novel.)
The second effect of a childhood audiobook addiction is that you can tackle books that are beyond your age cohort.
I couldn’t have sat down and read Garrison Keillor’s WLT: A Radio Romance in my early teens. Like a lot of adult novels it was too full of ambiguity, contradiction, and inaction. I would quickly have abandoned the book in favour of another distraction.
But listening to it on cassette was a passive undertaking – one that I could enjoy concurrently with any number of activities. And the words went in.
I Heart Planchettes
When I started university I took a more active approach to expanding my vocabulary, hoping that it might support my pursuit of a literature degree.
My daily technique was to heave open the ungainly Millenium Edition of the Collins English Dictionary (‘3.6 million words of text’) and randomly select an exotic new word (fribble, bisculate, embrangle). Then I would log it in my notebook.
As an aide memoire, I’d try to illustrate the word in representative fashion. For instance, the word stipple would be formed of tiny dots and erubescent would be rendered in varying shades of red.
This autodidactic approach led to occasional errors, such as when I chose planchette as my word of the day.
The definition offered was ‘a heart-shaped board on wheels, on which messages are written under supposed spiritual guidance.’
But with no explicit link to automatic writing or seances, I drew the wrong conclusion, literally.
I envisaged a device from the Victorian era: something like a heart-shaped skateboard, on which people would inscribe Hallmark-style bromides, before sliding the device toward the recipient by way of a pleasant surprise. Like a sober alternative to a singing telegram.
For example: you’d be sitting in your drawing room, overcome with ennui. Then you’d hear the squeak and whirr of casters as the planchette was rolled into the room, coming to a gentle stop at the foot of your Davenport desk. Looking down, you would see the message of encouragement pinned to the top: take heart, my darling.
Fortified by these supportive words, and a dash of laudanum, you could get through the rest of the day.
It made sense to me at the time.
Words in the wild
Planchette didn’t prove very useful to my studies. But more functional nouns, verbs and adjectives would eventually work their way, often pointlessly, into my essays.
These insertions felt like small triumphs to me, although I imagine they were tiresome distractions to my lecturers.
When I left education, I left behind my word-of-the-day habit as well. I didn’t renew the obsessive word hunting until a few years ago, as part of a prolonged journaling habit.
Previously, I’d act like a fisherman, opening the dictionary and randomly casting my net. Now I was a hunter – ruthlessly efficient, prepared to photograph or screenshot a new word the moment I encountered it in the wild.
This technique is not without flaws. Like many people, I do a good deal of my reading before bed – the exact moment you’re supposed to be staying away from all devices.
Instead, I found myself retrieving my phone from the bedside cabinet to check the meaning of sizar (neither as exciting or useful as it sounds). This approach doesn’t make for a relaxing bedtime and I’m not great in that regard to begin with.
Butterflies in the brain
I transcribe each new word neatly in the back of my journal – no illustration – pinning the elusive specimen in place like a butterfly on a mountboard. Gotta catch ’em all!
The unspoken logic behind this ongoing word-hunting is that I will, eventually, learn all words. After that point I’ll never encounter an unfamiliar term again (and presumably no more new phrases will be coined).
But here’s the trouble: while the words may stay in place on the page, their true home is the mind. And in my case, many of these butterflies detach themselves, fluttering about unhelpfully and unceasingly.
I confuse one specimen with another. Some of them are extremely well camouflaged. Many of them escape.
Perhaps the least I can do in the face of this chaos is to start to sort these specimens into various genera: the bawdy words, the foreign words, the ones I can never pronounce.
It’s high time I bring some order to my vocabulary; there can be no higher esperance, and no task more exigent.
Next time: useless words, stunt words, and words that I forgot I already knew
