Most English speakers know around 40,000 words, and typically use about half of them. It is the job of a writer to choose from the millions of words available in their language, arrange them in a certain order, and deliver them to a recipient so as to convey meaning. The act of selecting is further refined by an understanding of register and tone – different words serve us better when pleading with a grandchild than with a police officer.
Of course, words are only a small part of communication – we also utilise context, body language, facial expression and sensory cues when we try to express ourselves to another person. Nevertheless, words form the writer’s basic toolkit. We try to make our choices for positive reasons: which ones best convey our precise intention? The mood? The nuance? We read through the text again, cross out, resort to a thesaurus when stuck. We mostly stay unaware of the censor which sits in the back of our brain, a homunculus who sounds like our fiercest English teacher, or worse, our mother …
- Not less, FEWER! (less milk; fewer cows).
- Not disinterested, UNINTERESTED! (I’m uninterested in what you say; my judgement can be disinterested regarding this case).
- IT’S better to reward ITS attempts.
- TO spend TWO pounds is TOO much!
Readers imbibe clichés with their mother’s milk (see what I did there?) and regurgitate them unwittingly when they turn to writing. We cull them whenever we spot them, but oh, so many make it through unscathed.
We all have this shouty internal voice inhibiting our writing. And you, dear reader: which of our words have you shouting at the page, ‘No, it’s not…’?
Image acknowledgement
Thesaurus shelf photo by Meritkosy via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thesaurus_2.jpg
The featured image for this post is altered from the above image and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license in accordance with the requirements of the original licence.
Very true, Miriam! Lesser & fewer, yes!! And I really get annoyed with “the amount of people”, for example. People are NOT an AMOUNT! They are numbers. The number of people who… And it’s not just people who are thus misused. The amount of: cases, instances, accidents, anything really. Amount is uncountable – food, coffee, salt, etc.; numbers are countable.
And of course:: multiple. Americans have things only in multiples these days. Instead of many, several, etc., it’s multiple. Multipe people have reported… And so on.
So I’ve said my piece/peace.
Oh, yes! I get so infuriated with Richard Osman introducing his four ‘faces’ each week – what don’t they have bodies, I shout at the TV? The use of actually and really and literally all actually really and literally irritate me. I’d better stop or I might keep going all day.
Just to give the other side of selecting the right word, one of my favourites is susurrations. We need more words like this.