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| Source: Robotman from Monty by Jim Meddick |
A person with a rich and varied
vocabulary is more likely than a person of limited range to find the exact word to say the
exact thing in the exact way that they want.
From Beginnings of Rhetoric and Composition, by Adams Hill:
From Beginnings of Rhetoric and Composition, by Adams Hill:
It is, therefore, worthwhile for a young writer to keep his** ears open while conversation is going on about him and his eyes open while he is reading, and to note and remember every word that is new to him either in itself or in the meaning given to it.
He may thus, while avoiding both vulgarisms and high-flown expressions, enrich his vocabulary by drawing from the racy idioms of plain people and from the best utterances of great authors,—the two sources of life in a language.Hill tells us that by keeping our ears and eyes open to the world around us, we will be surprised to find how rapidly our vocabulary grows.
“When I was a boy,” Lincoln is reported to have said, “I used to hear the neighbors talking, and it bothered me so, because I could not understand them, that I used to sit up half the night thinking things out for myself. I remember that I did not know what the word demonstrate meant. So I stopped my studies then and there and got a volume of Euclid. Before I got through I could demonstrate everything in it, and I have never been bothered with demonstrate since." ***
* Look it up.
** Taken in the spirit of "mankind," this advice applies to women, too.
*** Quoted by Winston Churchill, in “TheCrisis.”
