vocabulary

Every one has experienced how learning an appropriate name for what was dim and vague cleared up and crystallized the whole matter. Some meaning seems distinct almost within reach, but is elusive; it refuses to condense into definite form; the attaching of a word somehow (just how, it is almost impossible to say) puts limits around the meaning, draws it out from the void, makes it stand out as an entity on its own account.

A true lady should have the wit and the imagination, or at least the very restraint, to express herself without resorting herself to such base vocabulary.

Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

We have too many high sounding words and too few actions that correspond with them.

A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.

She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men.And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.

I'd call him a sadistic, hippophilic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.

My only defense is the acquisition of vocabulary.

In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana.

I understand the gist of your speculation,' said Rhialto. 'It is most likely nuncupatory.

This document outlines our plan to perpetrate insurance fraud, insider trading, and character assassination....hopefully tripling our paycheck on this job.Okay, see? Those words I understand just fine. Use them more often.-Lieutenant Massey Reynstein & Captain Tagon

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.

A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.

Those were all big words, to be sure, but as has been said, September read often, and liked it best when words did not pretend to be simple, but put on their full armor and rode out with colors flying.

To enjoy and learn from what you read you must understand the meanings of the words a writer uses. You do yourself a grave disservice if you read around words you don__ know, or worse, merely guess at what they mean without bothering to look them up.For me, reading has always been not only a quest for pleasure and enlightenment but also a word-hunting expedition, a lexical safari.

He uses the nice old words so rich in tradition to be sure I know he means it.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.