Vocabulary

If you read lots of books (newspapers and magazines don't count) and always have your whole life, you know you don't automatically run to a dictionary every time you come across a word you don't know. And after years, no, decades of reading, you'll come across that word again and again, and although you've never actually looked up the word in a dictionary, and it's a word no one in their right mind would ever use in spoken English (unless you're say, Winston Churchill), you more or less understand the word by having read it countless times in context.

Take, for example, a word I read today and finally went to the dictionary for: "Blandishment." If you asked me a definition of the word, I would have no idea. But if you put it in a sentence, say, thus: "I hope the agency gets a handle on it with something other than blandishments from Blogger Bob" you kind of understand it because you've read it so many times before. I would have defined it as "a vague criticism, a gentle rebuke."


When I looked it up, I found that the actual definition was "A flattering or pleasing statement or action used to persuade someone gently to do something." Hmm. Well, I wasn't far off, but I wasn't spot on, either. I could have gotten through the rest of my life without having looked it up in a dictionary but there are hundreds, if not thousands of English words that I "kind of understand" if in context but couldn't give you a dictionary definition for.


And, if you know me at all by now, you'll know that that bothers me. From now on, if I come across the words "houri" (a voluptuous, alluring woman) "solipsistic" (the philosophical idea that one's own mind is all that exists), "heuristic" (enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves), "hegemony" (leadership or dominance, esp. by one country or social group), "recondite" (dealing with very profound, difficult, or abstruse subject matter) or "nostrum" (a medicine sold with false or exaggerated claims) I will indeed go immediately to the dictionary and memorise the definition.


After all, I am someone who wants graven on his headstone the epitaph "He did his crossword puzzles with a pen."


Addendum: Word of the Day! 


Logorrhea: incoherent and rambling repetitive speech


Check back for more words of the day, y'know, like stuff that's boring and unnecessary and just off the top of your head, like Sarah Palin, y'know? I could go on but I gotta go see how many beers I have left and if I have to go out and get more, because that'll be most annoying, really it will be.