Words don’t come easy... 15.05.08
DON'T you find that
frustrating? And no I don’t mean somebody starting a
column with a question like that and not explaining what
‘that’ is.
I mean more like when you are searching for a word and
you kinda know in your head what word you are looking
for but your brain has gone out to lunch so it just
keeps throwing up different words – none of which are
ever the word you want.
But that’s the thing with words, there are so damn many
of them.
In fact I’m beginning to wonder now if there shouldn’t
be some sort of a campaign to get rid of words that are
not used too much any more.
Words like lethologica for instance – when’s the last
time you used that in a sentence?
Come to think of it we could possibly also do away with
words that are too hard to spell or too hard to
pronounce as well. |
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Oh yeah and what about
those big words with the obscure meanings that people
will sometime throw into a sentence to try and impress
others with their wide ranging vocabulary? (Like
lethologica for instance.) Umm, maybe we should get rid
of some of those too.
I say all this because recently, well I was looking for
a word to use in a sentence and, well, try as I might I
just couldn’t think of the right word.
It was, as they say, on the tip of my tongue. Except
well in my case it wasn’t and I did actually even stand
in front of a mirror at one stage to check, when the
frustration at not being able to find the word had got
to a certain level.
In the end I just used another word, that kinda had the
same meaning, but which just wasn’t exactly the word
that I’d been looking for.
And then it hit me. I mean if there were less of these
other words that kinda meant what you were trying to say
out there, well it would surely increase the chances of
you actually trying to remember the word you were
looking for.
And if you don’t believe me, how’s about this then? We
all know what a shoe is don’t we...yet when I looked up
shoe in the thesaurus I got 68 more words for shoe!
Funnily enough I wasn’t greeted with the same barrage of
suggestions when I looked up thesaurus in the thesaurus.
I reckon the guy who came up with the idea for that wee
book could have taught those dot com guys a thing or
two.
I mean what a piece of brilliant marketing – a book that
has different words for thousands of words but doesn’t
have a different word for itself.
The guys at many’s a marketing company will be wondering
how they hadn’t managed to come up with a fantastic ruse
like that.
All this scrambling around for words also brought back a
memory from many years ago when I attended a lecture
given by some crazy professor on a subject called
critical practice.
From what I can recall this guy seemed to be suggesting
that things could be interpreted any damn way you wanted
and most things could mean anything at all. |
A table, he said, could be
interpreted in different ways and he insisted that our
thinking was all conditioned by the words we used.
What, he asked, if a table wasn’t called a table? What
if it were called, say an apple instead? Or indeed what
if a table was called something else like a Schnarf?
That isn’t a real word by the way and it was probably
around then that I left the lecture thinking this guy
was just babbling on, mixing up words and spewing out
any old nonsense.
It wasn’t until years later that it finally dawned on
me....umm, you know there might be a column in that... |
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A DROP OF
PORTER is
the weekly
column of
Inishowen
Independent
editor,
Liam Porter. |
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