5/9/2023 0 Comments What is a thesaurus(“Now,” he told an interviewer as an old man, “now is reality. Ken Dodd, the great English comedian, made up tattifilarious. Lewis Carroll made up chortle, and you absorbed it, placing it snugly between chuckle (benign and big-bellied) and cackle (witchy and weird). Which gets at who we are, as humans, doesn’t it? Feelings and circuitry. I looked up the verb excite just now and found the word in its affective ( touch, move) and mechanical ( electrify, galvanize) aspects. By going into the buzzing and jostling hive of words around a word, we get a purer sense of the word itself: its coloration, its interior, its traces of meaning. He’ll sound like a silly Billy, a twerp, a stooge.Ī thesaurus-here it comes-is for increasing one’s aliveness to words. He will pick the wrong word, and he won’t sound clever at all. You’re a shamanic trip into the essence of words: a shimmering, unfolding, occasionally scarifying million-petaled experience, a miraculous nest of emergent relationships, and the writer who abuses your nature, who exploits your abundance, will pay. Don’t say “in a shitty mood.” Say “captious.”īut that’s not how, or when, to use you. Reached for you, that is, when the words arriving in our forebrain, from the charred and private little glossary that we keep in our backbrain, seem … insufficient. A ThighMaster for out-of-condition prose. Or they’ll treat you as a mere lexical resource. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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