Having fun with words

The oth­er day while writ­ing,  I took some­thing like fif­teen min­utes to find the right word for a sen­tence. It hap­pens fair­ly often, for a vari­ety of rea­sons: I’m try­ing to con­vey just the right nuanced emo­tion for  the moment and I am a strong believ­er that every word con­tains some emo­tion, how­ev­er slight. There’s also the ques­tion of sen­tence rhythm, the way it flows, and the way, there­fore, a para­graph cours­es. I may choose a two syl­la­ble word, as opposed to one with three, or one. Then, too, I love words, find them fas­ci­nat­ing, and love to play with them.

I am mind­ful, too, of my read­ers, and their abil­i­ty to make sense of what I write. In that regard I have a self-imposed rule: Nev­er put a unique or unfa­mil­iar word in my open­ing para­graphs. I don’t want my read­er to stop, and mut­ter, “This is too hard for me.”

As I pur­sue words I have an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly large choice. The Eng­lish lan­guage has more than a mil­lion words, the largest vocab­u­lary of all lan­guages because it is an amal­gam of dif­fer­ent lan­guages. Hap­pi­ly, Eng­lish has been miser­ly about let­ting old words go, and gen­er­ous about let­ting new words in. 

In this effort I have a silent part­ner (right in my com­put­er), to which I often turn. Ref­er­enced as the OED, I mean the com­plete Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary. It is a vast assem­blage of words, all Eng­lish words, def­i­n­i­tions, and what I par­tic­u­lar­ly love, an his­tor­i­cal the­saurus. For some­one who writes his­tor­i­cal fic­tion, it is a cru­cial tool.

When writ­ing his­tor­i­cal fic­tion I has­ten to say I do NOT check every word. But when I have a key word, I often look to see if the word was even used at the time of my sto­ry. Thus, a char­ac­ter of mine, in a cur­rent project, is asked to flirt with cus­tomers. But the word was not used at the time of my tale—1724. (Flirt enters the lan­guage in 1781.) To express the idea one wrote “to play the coquette.” (But his­tor­i­cal­ly, accord­ing to the OED, there have been four­teen (!) words used to express this. I can use them all.)

Thus, not  “I became ful­ly awake,” but, “I roused myself to full wake-full­ness.  Not, “The girl sat there sulk­ing,” but “The girl sat there, pout-mouthed.”

This kind of work­ing and think­ing allows me to write some­thing like this:

 “No doubt it is unkind of me—the oblig­a­tory author of my autobiography—to leave myself—and you—in such a pre­car­i­ous predica­ment, pos­si­bly drown­ing and thus in dan­ger of end­ing my life and my tale too hasti­ly. But before I go for­ward, you need to learn some­thing about the life I lived.”

As I see it, if you are not hav­ing fun with words, you’re not hav­ing fun writing.