KEEPING OUR VOCABULARY FRESH

 Our vocabulary must be increased constantly if we wish to express ourselves better and more accurately. Since my father gave me the daily task of looking up words in dictionaries when I was about ten, I have been adding new ones to my vocabulary to this day. Not a day goes by that I do not strive to enlarge my stock of words in both English and Spanish.

Most additions enter my active vocabulary and become part of my daily discourse. Others fade away and remain only passive elements of my language. That is why I urge you, and myself, to refresh our vocabulary through active reading. 

For example, prig is a word I learnt while reading the autobiography of Bertrand Russell. According to him, many of his friends and acquaintances were prigs. Obviously, he did not consider himself one. Yesterday the word popped up again from the page of a book. And the word coy stayed with me while reading Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress. These Anglo-Saxon words, short and to the point, are a joy, as Strunk and White remind us.

I first heard hubris in Lesley Hazleton’s TED lecture “A Tourist Reads the Koran,” which I urge you to listen to. Hubris and gravitas are two words I particularly like and often refresh in my mind. And many more besides.

Luckily, language is an ever-growing process, and we can never exhaust its riches.