The right word…
When I started my last day-job, occasionally the language in my mind was still Spanish. I would make work presentations where I’d need to adlib a bit, especially in Q&A, and it was frustrating that sometimes the Spanish word was the first one to pop into my mind…and embarrassing when I used it. I’d spent a long time living in Colombia and had reached the point where I even dreamed in Spanish—extreme total immersion, if you will—so I wrote this off as a natural phenomena that would soon go away as I adjusted back into U.S. society.
As I write my fiction, that’s still happening, although less often. This leads me to the subject of this article: How does an author know the right word to use in a given circumstance? Putting aside my strange quirks attributable to my sojourn in Colombia causing my first choice to be a Spanish word (sometimes I have to check that), consider any word and you will find synonyms for it (an online thesaurus is good for that). That process might help you find the right word—your mind recognizes it—but it won’t tell you the different shades and nuances of meaning that the mind often seems to know intuitively.
Most authors have an uncanny ability to choose the right word. Of course, and frequently as a reviewer, I’ve seen some bloopers, but, in general, an author’s mind is on automatic and chooses the correct word. Better said, best word, because correctness is more logical and bestness is more emotional (when the right word doesn’t exist, you can make one up…like I just did for the property of being best!). I suppose the more talented the writer, the better the skill at choosing the right word.
Whether from aging or the influence of my second language (Spanish has been relegated to second place now, primarily due to the lack of use), I often “know” there’s a best word choice but just can’t remember it, so I write an X and go on. As I content edit (I continuously do that), the right replacement often pops into my head.
That’s an even stranger phenomenon: My mind knowing there’s a right word—I say to myself when I’ve found it, “Eureka!”—but not coming up with it immediately. The human mind is a strange computer. There’s no operations manual for it, but everyday things can seem stranger than ESP.
“That’s just active versus passive vocabulary,” you say. Okay, but giving it a name doesn’t take away the mystery. And, of course, finding the right word is a problem for all of us in everyday speech, but do writers suffer from it more? Moreover, I always thought my writing vocabulary is passive vocabulary. Maybe there are multiple levels of active and passive vocabulary? Psychologists and other professionals studying the human brain, speech, and language, please weigh in. I might be an ex-scientist, but this is one of many scientific problems I can’t even imagine how to solve!
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Comments are always welcome.
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Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
