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Are you ever writing, typing out in the first rush of creativity, and you need a word for the thing, and you look down and you’ve typed the word for the thing, but when you actually look at the word you don’t entirely recognise it? Like, you have to look it up quickly, just to make sure that it is in fact a word, that it’s a word you know, that it’s a word that means what apparently your subconscious thinks it does?
This happens to me a surprising amount. I’m mid-flow, and I look down, and for some reason I’ve typed ‘effulgence’, wanting a different word for 'radiance’, and I’m like … wait, what does effulgence mean? And I look it up, and yes, it does in fact mean radiance, and I’m all 'yay, go subconscious me!’.
I think part of it is that I’ve learned a whole bunch of my vocabulary from context, from reading a whole bunch of books since I was tiny. Some bit of my brain has a memory of reading a passage about radiance somewhere or other that had 'effulgence’ in it, and so coughed the word back up while I was in spate and running on instinct and needed something in that ballpark. I don’t know the word, in the sense of having formally learned it (or heard it) or being able to formally define it, but I remember from that distant context that it means something close to this thing.
I think I’ve always learned words mostly from books. I have a memory of being followed around the schoolyard by a (somewhat scary) crowd of kids asking me to define a bunch of words because I’d 'eaten the dictionary’, but I don’t remember reading dictionaries much. I mean, when I had to look up a specific word, yes, or check one, and I think I sometimes browsed thesauri, but most of the time I’m pretty sure I just read the word in a book and came away with a vague idea what it meant, which sometimes sharpened the more I came across it.
Heh. I don’t know. I think I just have a lot of random words that float up inside my head, like debris from the shipwrecks of books I read ages ago. Sometimes, when I’m writing, they even turn out to be useful :)
This happens to me a surprising amount. I’m mid-flow, and I look down, and for some reason I’ve typed ‘effulgence’, wanting a different word for 'radiance’, and I’m like … wait, what does effulgence mean? And I look it up, and yes, it does in fact mean radiance, and I’m all 'yay, go subconscious me!’.
I think part of it is that I’ve learned a whole bunch of my vocabulary from context, from reading a whole bunch of books since I was tiny. Some bit of my brain has a memory of reading a passage about radiance somewhere or other that had 'effulgence’ in it, and so coughed the word back up while I was in spate and running on instinct and needed something in that ballpark. I don’t know the word, in the sense of having formally learned it (or heard it) or being able to formally define it, but I remember from that distant context that it means something close to this thing.
I think I’ve always learned words mostly from books. I have a memory of being followed around the schoolyard by a (somewhat scary) crowd of kids asking me to define a bunch of words because I’d 'eaten the dictionary’, but I don’t remember reading dictionaries much. I mean, when I had to look up a specific word, yes, or check one, and I think I sometimes browsed thesauri, but most of the time I’m pretty sure I just read the word in a book and came away with a vague idea what it meant, which sometimes sharpened the more I came across it.
Heh. I don’t know. I think I just have a lot of random words that float up inside my head, like debris from the shipwrecks of books I read ages ago. Sometimes, when I’m writing, they even turn out to be useful :)
