English could almost be classed as a pigeon language, incorporating Latin, Ancient Greek, German and French, not to mention other strands like Yiddish and Spanish. Our ancestors glommed onto new words, but were reluctant to relinquish the old, which gradually acquired slightly differentiated, nuanced meanings, like canal and channel, poor and pauper, house and home, sensual and sensuous, childish and childlike. Or we held onto a native word – book – and filched the Latin adjective, literary.
Anglophones are the world's linguistic magpies: over half our words are from non-Anglo-Saxon stock. This hodgepodge provides an enormously rich palette for writers. As Bill Bryson points out in his excellent popular study, Mother Tongue
In short, we're spoilt for choice. So be persnickety: strive for the right vocabulary. Don't settle for generic terms like good, beautiful and breathtaking, when whole flocks of colorful, precise words soar on the horizon. A good author should be able to justify every turn of phrase.
As George Orwell writes: "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print". He argues that using clichés is a substitute for thinking, a form of automatic writing: "Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
Consider this passage by D. H. Lawrence: "I sat and looked at the ruins on the old, olive-fuming shores, at all the peace of the ancient world still covered in sunshine" (Twilight in Italy, 1916). The inclusion of "olive-fuming" ignites the sentence.
As Poynter's Roy Peter Clark stresses: "Choose words the average writer avoids but the average reader understands ... All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake, but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the act of reporting always expands the number of useable words. The reporter sees and hears and records. The seeing leads to language."
Play with the sound and shape of words too. A "buxom belle" is more zingy than a "large-chested woman", both in tone and alliteration. "From loggerheads to lager-head louts" neatly connects turtles and tourists. Inspiration for such bon mots often occurs during the rewriting phase. And yes, good bloggers redraft, polish, groom and buff pieces until they're honed and shining. They slice out excess verbiage, weave in witticisms and smooth transitions. They not only write, but rewrite: often the key to strong texts...
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1 comments:
If Bryson thinks English has a lot of words for the same thing, he should try Japanese. He'll find out just how many different ways to say one thing there really are.
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