Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Impoverished Vocabulary

I consider myself to have a fairly broad vocabulary, yet I often find myself grasping for the right word--it often takes between 24 hours and never before I think of the word I'm looking for. Yesterday in an email to a friend I actually said I was "dissed." I don't think I've actaully ever used the word "dis" before in my life. It wasn't until I was driving home later that evening that I realized "slighted" was the word I was looking for.

I also sometimes consider myself sort-of a writer, but I usually can summon words no more descriptive than "wonderful" or "great" or "amazing" when describing something (see, I just used "descriptive" and "describe" in the same sentence because I couldn't think of the right word!!) And all-too-often "cool" and "awesome" rear their ugly high-school heads and leap from my tongue unbidden.

On Monday we had a staff day-style feel-good fest for all of the employees of my government agency. Our guest speaker was a woman from the Governor's office whose second-most used word, right after "um," was "incredible." She is supposed to be (incredibly) smart, but between the poor speaking skills and limited vocabulary, she sounded incredibly not-smart.

I am concerned that I too sound incredibly not-smart because the words...all those lovely words...that I want lie unused at the bottom of the motherhood-addled pit that used to be my brain. Which would just be incredibly, incredibly sad.

6 comments:

  1. Oh how we sacrifice ourselves for our children. I've been pondering this very phenomena since hanging with all the lovely demented folks.

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  2. Oh how we sacrifice ourselves for our children. I've been pondering this very phenomena since hanging with all the lovely demented folks.

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  3. That is EXACTLY my problem! Since my son was born, sometimes I just sit at the computer and stare at the screen for 2, 3, 4, 5 minutes before I can think of that perfectly normal word I was looking for.
    Do you think we ever get our sharp brains and our thesaurus-like vocabularies back? Here's hoping! =)

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  4. and what does it say about me that it never occurred to me to question your use of the word "dissed?!" i mean, i'll admit...since i haven't heard it used since the 80s, it did occur to me that perhaps you were using the word in some retro-cool way that i am clearly not hip to. which you really could have played off, btw.

    but i can relate. i often find myself saying aloud "what did i just say?" after yet another grammatical bungle. at least my kid isn't old enough to correct me. yet.

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  5. Word choice is so important. I've been reading through my manuscript and have suddenly realized how often I use the words "really," "However," and "but."

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