User blog:Waldere/Learn a New Word

A few weeks ago, I won the "Learn a new word" challenge hosted by the Sedulous Sesquipedelians guild. As someone who enjoys expanding their vocabulary, I was proud to win it, and glad for the motivation to make self-promotion a routine part of my day.

However, I've noticed a pattern whenever I try to bolster my vocabulary: I look up the word once (content that I'll remember it), forget its precise meaning or forget it exists entirley once the opportunity arises to use it, and resort once again to simple thesaurus swapping. I'm sick of it. I don't want to "learn" new words; I want to learn them.

In order to break my cycle, I used the notes function of the challenge daily to keep an ongoing list of the words I'd learned. Every day, before checking off the daily, I would review the list to see how many words I actually remembered. If I couldn't give its definition, I looked it up again. Only once I'd satisfied myself about every item on the list would I add the new one I'd found and check off the daily. That system works reasonably well, but it could work even better. Which brings me to why I'm writing this blog post.

Nothing cements one's understanding of a word like actually using it, which is where I've so often fumbled in the past. The joy of learning obscure words is that you can name things you may not even have been able to adequately conceptualize before, thus growing your ability to think and perceive; the challenge is that their utility is often limited, thus meaning the opportunities to use them (and thereby reinforce your understanding of them) are equally limited. To help overcome that obstacle, I'm going to use this blog post to keep track of the words I've learned, as well as sample sentences to practice my understanding of them. The redundancy with my other list certainly won't hurt in terms of memorizing them, but I foresee the real benefit being my ability to use them.

Updating this blog post will be an ongoing project. I'll start adding the words already on my list, then start update this post every day with a new word and new examples. This time, I'm serious about truly expanding my vocabulary, instead of merely peeking beyond its borders.

I hereby dedicate this list to all my fellow logonauts: may your lexicons burst with the babbling bijous of culled from your linguistic excavations. Anagogic (adj.): allegorical or spiritual interpretation, especially of a sacred work like the Bible; a spiritual application of words

"I've never much cared for poetry. I always take what I'm reading literally and find it silly and pointless. My friend told me that to truly appreciate poetry, I need to read it more anagogically."