Thoughts on Writing #18: Thesaurus vs. Velociraptor.

Every word has a purpose and a meaning, but there's no reason to clutter up what you're trying to say with a bunch of words that will leave most readers diving for their dictionaries.

You mean there's really no excuse to describe someone as "lounging like an odalisque"?

In my opinion, only if she actually is. You have to be careful that she's not actually sprawled like a slattern instead.

(Darn my lack of paid account = inability to edit comments.)

It would actually never dawn on me that some of the words on your "favorite words" list would count as complicated. "Autumnal" and "pendulous", for example; I suspect "Stygian" and "sepulcher" are a reflection of the people I hang around with.

...but redact, oration, autumnal, and sepulcher don't seem like complicated words!

(Neither does necrosis, but that? That is actually entirely your fault, and I know it. *grins*)

*giggle* I was just considering sending you a book with a character that obsesses over necrotic fascitis (spelling?)...

Suit your words to the task at hand.

Boiling the essay down to this core concept, I agree completely.

But . . .

Reading this, I think some may infer, incorrectly, that big or non-standard words should only be used when they enhance practicality or clarity. But they may also be used, successfully, when appropriate to the milieu, or even when they fit the author's chosen stylistic voice.

For the former, yes, having a modern-day hero tell the heroine that she has a lovely countenance would be, well, weird, unless it's to illuminate something about the hero's character. But conversely, you're unlikely to find Aragorn telling Arwen she's got one hot kisser. Dialog should reflect how the people in the world you've built talk. (Yes, I'm aware that many excellent novels in various period-style fantasy genres and sf futures have been written in which the dialog uses a contemporary style. That's a matter of authorial choice, not a standard for How It Should Be Done.)

Similarly, vocabulary choices in narration can be used to set tone and mood. If you want to draw the reader into that dank castle, and feel how heavily impending doom weighs on everyone, well then, maybe the king isn't just sad or gloomy. Maybe he really is lugubrious. Words don't just have meaning - sometimes they have noticeable weight and texture as well.

Mastering those extra dimensions, knowing when upping your vocabulary level enhances the story and when it just distracts readers by making them think you're showing off, is a skill, and one that can be difficult to acquire. It's probably true that most people shouldn't even try to write like Gene Wolfe. But I'm awfully glad that Gene Wolfe writes like Gene Wolfe.

My pet peeve is the wrongful use of 'regardless' - as in, when someone puts 'ir' in front of it, thinking that's a word.

Poor dears.

When I discovered what subrogation was, I danced a jig. Fantastic word!

*waves hello from the insurance industry*

:D

My favorite word is "superfluous".

A friend of mine wrote an essay on language usage in Rex Stout. Great piece.

A girl I was friends with in high school was a tremendous fan of that sometimes-horrid beast, the thesaurus. Sure, sometimes it was nice to know that her female protagonist's eyes were cerulean, because that is a specific shade of blue, but just as often working one's way through the writing was worse than wading through quicksand. If more than one paragraph was incomprehensible (and frequently, it was), I'd give up on everything she'd written and pick up something different--cross stitch, cooking, juggling hollow glass balls filled with quick lime, etc. Because any of those things would be less complicated and painful than laboring through one more clause filled with words that should have been voted off the island of English.

True, true. One must, if one wishes to write in a given fashion, obtain a situation in which it fits.

I utterly adore the prospect of telling some anal-retentive dipshit to "attempt aerodynamically-stable intercourse with a high-velocity spinning toroidal pastry," but have yet to find a good opportunity to do so, and as such am just sitting on it (and occasionally trying to find a better synonym for "rolling").

Revolving? Oscillating?

'the heart's-blood of swans'

...is _sticky_.

I love the word petechial. Just the way it sounds. I doubt I'll ever use it in a book, but it's an awesome word nonetheless.

In my own opinion, you are always better off using a word you actually knows than trying to dig up and plug in an unfamiliar one on the spot. If you don't know the difference between a bodkin and a stiletto, all of your characters should stick to daggers. There are shades of denotation and connotation, subtleties of history, and details of usage for words you don't know just as much as for words you've been using all your life. Even a good dictionary won't convey all of this. When the word you're using is also unfamiliar to your reader, you can probably get away with it, but for that reader who really knows that word, the fact that you're not using it quite right will grate.

If you use a thesaurus now and then to remind you of the perfect word that you know but just can't recall right now, great. But if you let it tempt you to put in words you've never seen except in the dictionary (or worse only in the thesaurus), it will make your writing worse.

An especially good thing is if you can find a thesaurus that bolds the common words in its results.

Not quite the same thing, but rhymezone.com does this. I use both rhymezone and thesaurus.com for songwriting when I'm stuck, because often I know what I want to say, but I'm going to need to restructure the rhyme or reorganize to fit within the scansion. But, just like writing a story, when writing a song you still need to keep to words appropriate to the character, mood, story being told, time, etc.

Which is why having the common words stand out more in your results list is a really handy thing.