How to Build a Vocabulary

We can study vocabulary by memorizing lists of words (a tedious but sometimes necessary project) and we can assiduously mark the line where we find an unfamiliar word in what we’re reading, later to look up its definition and build a list of our own. These are basic techniques to increase the number of words at our command, but when we want to push further ahead, an advanced study of vocabulary involves what is called synonymy, the close study of words generally similar in meaning but different in the notes, or distinguishing characteristics, they bring to a reader’s attention.

A friend of mine, for example, mentioned recently that he was reading a biography of the illustrious Canadian physician William Osler, who was instrumental in advancing medical education and diagnostic sophistication. My friend, a physician himself, wrote to me that Osler, who died in 1919, possessed for the entirety of his professional technology only “his wits, a caring heart, and a stethoscope.” That is a fine phrase on two counts: the choice of the nouns wits and heart (more about that in a moment), and the combination of those two organic realities with the mechanicalness of a stethoscope.

Before looking at the two organic nouns (which are directly germane to our topic here), we should note in passing that when my friend combines nouns of unexpectedly different kinds (organic and mechanical) with the same verb (here possessed), he is configuring his language in a way that resembles what is rhetorically termed a zeugma. The word is Greek, meaning a yoke, and the figure points to the joining of words not all of which are connected logically (or generically) in the same way. The classic example I remember from a college lecture on the topic is: the boy was covered with jam and embarrassment, where an inanimate, concrete entity is yoked to a psychological, abstract one. The result is tight compression and a sudden punch.

But let’s return to the nouns wits and heart. Why not knowledge and attention, or information and sympathy? Wits and knowledge and information all certainly have to do with the mind, but knowledge refers to its contents generally, and information points to specific data. Wits, however, means an ability which is inherent in someone characterologically, and that peculiar note of the word is exactly what my friend wanted to isolate and bring to my attention. One fine work to consult on these matters of linguistic discrimination is Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms (First Edition, 1942). There, under the heading “mind,” is this discerning distinction: Wit…and wits are often merely homely or colloquial equivalents of mind…. Usually, however, the term carries a stronger implication of an inborn power or of native capacity than mind, which often suggests training and development: it therefore may imply ability to use the senses quickly and readily, strong common sense, or intelligence that is the result of the active use of these.” It seems to me that wits, then, hit the mark to describe what this famous physician was famous for.

And why not attention or sympathy instead of heart? Attention carries with it a cognitive connotation: we pay attention with our mind, for example, and so that noun would be a lesser choice because it too, like knowledge or information, would point to the mental, thinking side of the physician’s manner. Sympathy, on the contrary, points to the emotional, and that is something very different from the heart, which is traditionally the seat of the soul, the ethical, not affective, center point of one’s character. Says Webster’s again, under the heading “center”: “Heart, like the organ from which it derives its figurative implications, applies to a place or thing that lies well within a region, a system, or the like, and which, usually, constitutes the source of life and power of the entire region or system.” Is that not again exactly to the point: the source of life and power of this physician’s unique self?

Close reading, of course, remains the primary way we extend our reach to the word we need when we’re writing and revising, but systematic study will complement that first way of building a vocabulary. All of the further information we need is had not after specialized study, but with the help of a few good reference works like Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms or James Fernald’s English Synonyms and Antonyms. Be careful, though. Unlike these works which carefully explain the nuanced differences between terms, thesauri, like the well-known Roget’s Thesaurus (formally, A Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases) group words of similar meaning, but do not insightfully explain the differences. That can be useful when we’re just trying to prompt our memory, but less helpful when we want to discern subtle shades of meaning and make our writing precise.

On a walk in the afternoon yesterday, the sky across one broad reach was powder blue in the distant east, azure in my middle range, and cobalt far off to the west. All at once that sky appeared soft and gentle, paradisiacal, and angry. All that, but certainly not just blue.

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