• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

Best way to expand vocabulary?

Magic Poriferan

^He pronks, too!
Joined
Nov 4, 2007
Messages
14,081
MBTI Type
Yin
Enneagram
One
Instinctual Variant
sx/sp
You are actually making fun of Catholics whenever you say Hocus Pocus.
 
Joined
May 27, 2008
Messages
1,026
MBTI Type
ENTP
You are actually making fun of Catholics whenever you say Hocus Pocus.

good call... "hoc est enim corpus meum" ==> "hoc est corpus" ==> "hocus pocus"... though to be fair the Catholic laity probably came up with it...

I don't buy most of the other etymological stories... OED, from what I recall, said it came from local magicians' saying something like "hax pax" when doing tricks, but that itself must have come from the liturgy, so it amounts to the same thing.
 

edcoaching

New member
Joined
Jun 30, 2008
Messages
752
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
7
One of my friends this summer read with a dictionary in hand, writing down the new words he wanted to remember in a novel. Well, at least the ones he found interesting and wanted to use again.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Entrepreneurs

The meaning of a word is its history of use.

This is very true, particularly for English.

As English has been borrowing words from other languages for a very long time.

And each English word has its own history. And the history of an English word can be deciphered in part from its spelling.

From this point of view it is unfortunate that Noah Webster, the great American lexicographer, was a deeply committed political revolutionary and so quite naturally, and with the best of intentions, tried to revolutionise English.

He was extraordinarily successful and created American English with its own spelling.

This had the effect of casting American English partially adrift from English.

And so we have the quite humourous saying of your President that French has no word for entrepreneur.

And of course in the larger sphere all revolutionaries overthrow history and want to start again. We saw this, for instance, in Cambodia where the revolutionaries started again from Year Zero, with disastrous results.

Noah Webster was only partially successful but he did cut American English from its history. And you can see this in America today which is more focused on the future than the past.

And if we don't know where we have been, we move into the future somewhat blind.

However American English has enormous energy as does America as whole, and we all benefit from this.

And although French may have no word for entrepreneur, America is full of the most wonderful entrepreneurs.
 
Joined
May 27, 2008
Messages
1,026
MBTI Type
ENTP
^ This was probably one of your best posts ever, Victor.

EVEN though I don't agree with everything here... since for me American English was not essentially different simply due to Webster... it really came into its own with distinctively American advertising, pulp comics, cinema, television, musical forms like blues, jazz, rock, and today, rap and hip-hop...
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
^ This was probably one of your best posts ever, Victor.

EVEN though I don't agree with everything here... since for me American English was not essentially different simply due to Webster... it really came into its own with distinctively American advertising, pulp comics, cinema, television, musical forms like blues, jazz, rock, and today, rap and hip-hop...

You are quite right - American English has a vitality all of its own.

But I would like to confess to you, providing you don't tell anyone.

For quite a long time I had an antipathy to American English and I refused to read American literature. And I would rail against Americanisms. But eventually it blew my mind.

And I further confess that I am tempted to imitate my American cousins. But I can't quite do it. Perhaps it is because I never fell in love with Jazz. Or perhaps it is just that I lack the energy.

Nevertheless I have found an alternative in the Noosphere where I write, as you see, Telegraphic Prose.

And I am even thinking of leaving text behind and speaking to you by video in the Noosphere.

But so far I haven't found the rhythms to do this or the tone or even the words.

So I have been struck dumb not only by American English but also by the Noosphere.
 

colmena

señor member
Joined
Apr 27, 2008
Messages
1,549
MBTI Type
INXP
.

Find the purpose of your communication and then work backwards.

Ted, yours seems to be to unlock others' Ni whilst exercising your own.


I still think Charlie Chaplin is pretty far up there in terms of efficiency of communication.


Religious scripture hasn't done badly.

.
 
Joined
May 27, 2008
Messages
1,026
MBTI Type
ENTP
You are quite right - American English has a vitality all of its own.

But I would like to confess to you, providing you don't tell anyone.

For quite a long time I had an antipathy to American English and I refused to read American literature. And I would rail against Americanisms. But eventually it blew my mind.

And I further confess that I am tempted to imitate my American cousins. But I can't quite do it. Perhaps it is because I never fell in love with Jazz. Or perhaps it is just that I lack the energy.

Nevertheless I have found an alternative in the Noosphere where I write, as you see, Telegraphic Prose.

And I am even thinking of leaving words behind and speaking to you by video in the Noosphere.

But so far I haven't found the rhythms to do this or the tone or even the words.

So I have been struck dumb not only by American English but also by the Noosphere.

Not quite struck dumb... but the telegraphic prose isn't a bad style... clipped and bulleted... very modern... very internet friendly, as long as it doesn't exceed a page or two per section.

But the days of the binary opposition between American and British Englishes are long over... even within those two categories there are numerous groupings... American surfer-Southern drawl-Boston Brahmin-Brooklyn brawl and BBC-Brixton-Cockney-Brit Reggaeton etc...

Now in addition to those we have a whole slew of Latino and Indian (real Indian)-influenced Englishes...
 
O

Oberon

Guest
Read, but don't read crap.

Read Gore Vidal novels. Read Scientific American. Read New Yorker. (Okay, New Yorker may be crap, but it's fairly erudite crap.) Subscribe to at least one peer-reviewed publication. If you want to focus on a particular discipline, order a journal from that discipline.

Avoid People magazine at all costs, and turn off the d@mn TV.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Not quite struck dumb... but the telegraphic prose isn't a bad style... clipped and bulleted... very modern... very internet friendly, as long as it doesn't exceed a page or two per section.

But the days of the binary opposition between American and British Englishes are long over... even within those two categories there are numerous groupings... American surfer-Southern drawl-Boston Brahmin-Brooklyn brawl and BBC-Brixton-Cockney-Brit Reggaeton etc...

Now in addition to those we have a whole slew of Latino and Indian (real Indian)-influenced Englishes...

It's funny, I have coffee every morning in Green Square. And sometimes there is an American sitting nearby. Usually they are American Marines - I can tell by the very short haircut and their delightful politeness. And naturally I speak to them and quite naturally call them Yankees. But I get a quizzical look, particularly from the Black Marines. And then I try to save the situation by explaining that all Americans, black or white, rich or poor even male or female are all, to me, Yankees. And then they explain to me what, "a Yankee", really is. But the distinction is lost on me. To me your Americanness seems to override all other distinctions.

Of course you can distinguish one from the other just as I can distinguish the class of an Englishman by his accent.
 

heart

heart on fire
Joined
May 19, 2007
Messages
8,456
I am too lazy to read if someone already said this, but a good way is to pick something you find interesting, a favorite book or article and then make yourself paraphrase a paragraph or two a day, use a good thesaurus to come up with a variety of alternative words.
 

heart

heart on fire
Joined
May 19, 2007
Messages
8,456
It's funny, I have coffee every morning in Green Square. And sometimes there is an American sitting nearby. Usually they are American Marines - I can tell by the very short haircut and their delightful politeness. And naturally I speak to them and quite naturally call them Yankees. But I get a quizzical look, particularly from the Black Marines. And then I try to save the situation by explaining that all Americans, black or white, rich or poor even male or female are all, to me, Yankees. And then they explain to me what, "a Yankee", really is. But the distinction is lost on me. To me your Americanness seems to override all other distinctions.

Of course you can distinguish one from the other just as I can distinguish the class of an Englishman by his accent.

I take it you've never run into any real Delieverance style rednecks and called them "Yankees" lol. :happy2:

victor said:
And I would rail against Americanisms. But eventually it blew my mind.

Understate much?


But yeah, sympathy on the Jazz thing. I'm not wild about pure Jazz either.
Maybe get yourself some Freestyle and Funk to listen to.

...
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
The wrong question keeps us word poor

6sticks said:
Well I don't know about you lot but reading a dictionary cover to cover worked for me. But that's just how I trundle.

Apparently not.

Learning is an interesting problem - and here we are interested in learning vocabulary.

And usually we have a problem because we are asking the wrong question.

And here we have the wrong question written in bold type above us, that is, "What is the best way to expand vocabulary?".

This is simply a trap - as long as we keep asking this question, we will have a problem - as long as we keep trying to learn individual words, we will remain word poor.

In fact we learn new words by first of all, falling in love with them, and then understanding them and finally assimilating them into our gestalt - that is, by assimilating them into our whole understanding - into our whole world view.

So we don't learn individual words for their own sake, but we learn individual words to increase our understanding.

So the wrong question is, "What is the best way to expand our vocabulary?", and the better question is, "What is the better way to increase our understanding?".

The wrong question is answered by the Readers' Digest in its section of, "Increase your word power". Or the wrong question is answered by reading the dictionary.

The wrong question gives the wrong answers - garbage in, garbage out. And the better question gives the better answers.

So how can we increase our understanding?

We can increase our understanding by reading books that are just slightly beyond us - just as we become better tennis players by playing with someone who is slightly better than us.

And as our understanding grows, so will our vocabulary.
 

dnivera

New member
Joined
May 4, 2008
Messages
165
MBTI Type
ISTJ
Enneagram
6w5
Instinctual Variant
sp
Word games are fun, like Yahoo Word Racer, Scramble, or anagrams. You'll learn a lot of useless, obscure 3-letter words.

Uhh....to learn real words, read a newspaper like the New York Times or any magazine - start with a hobby mag or general interest one like Wired. I get the occasional chuckle from the witty writing in mags like Esquire, unexpectedly.
 

Eileen

New member
Joined
Apr 19, 2007
Messages
2,179
MBTI Type
INFJ
Enneagram
6?
What have you found to be the best way to expand your vocabulary? I hear just reading a lot does well. Are there any books aimed at this that work?

Nah, just read stuff that challenges you intellectually. The vocabulary will probably be there too.

As you do that, if you want extra vocabulary development, I'd suggest studying up on greek/latin word elements. That's a good way to attack words.

I also have a really geeky GRE/SAT vocab flashcard formula, but I don't think that's what you're asking, and I don't want to flash everybody with my dorky teacherness.
 
Top