I am beginning to suspect that using a thesaurus is actually bad for my diction. It seems to prevent me from pulling the right word out of my brain.
As I was typing the previous post about LinkedIn, I was struggling for a word to replace "populations" in the first line. I was thinking of something that probably starts with an "m" and has three or so syllables. Not coming up with it, I went to thesaurus.com and searched for "population". From there I went to "community" and then to "association". The "m" word wasn't in any of the lists. I gave up.
But the interesting thing is that the longer I searched, the more I lost that it's-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue feeling. The feeling that I would recognize the "m" word when I saw it. Reading and processing all those synonyms watered down my own impression of what I wanted to convey. I was trying to connect with a meaning that had formed, but not revealed itself, in the back of my mind. The impostor ideas hid it like a zebra in a herd.
It's entirely possible that "demographic" was the word I was searching for. I no longer know.
EDIT
I think Panlexicon would serve me better. It's a tag-cloud-based analog to a thesaurus. If the underlying database was an actual thesaurus, so much the better. Though in this case it still hasn't given me the right answer ... and it doesn't recognize the word "demographic".
Jeff, I know precisely the feeling you describe, because I constantly experience it myself. And while a good thesaurus is often the best tool, it's easy to rely too much on it. I've found that when a word is on the tip of my tongue and won't come off, it's sometimes even more effective to use Google to find it than anything else. Or--terribly old-fashioned but also sometimes effective--calling a good friend who's well-read and asking them. Though naturally, that's kind of a last resort. Either way, I appreciate that you also respect the power of just the right word. At a certain age, our brains don't always provide the most direct route to get there, but the journey is worth it in the end, whichever path you take. And I promise you that the more you write, the more supple your brain becomes in this and other areas.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure you mean 'diction?' I would have said 'vocabulary.'
ReplyDeleteOr 'erudition.'
ReplyDeleteDefinitely not "erudition" but you had me second-guessing myself about "vocabulary". I've always taken diction and vocabulary as more or less interchangeable, at least in this usage.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to claim I used "diction" as a play on words, referring to "dictionary" in contrast to thesaurus. But the truth is that I didn't notice that coincidence until I typed "diction" into dictionary.com.
At least "too clever" is not something I usually suffer from.
That's funny. I did assume you were using it as a play on words.
ReplyDelete