When Words Disappear…
And How Some Authors Can Fight What They Can’t Change
By Carolyn Howard-Johnson,
author of the HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers
Including the soon to be released Word by Word: A Vocabulary for Success
Words disappear all the time. They disappear from dictionaries because the English language is full of words lexicographers have determined we don’t use any more--or don’t use enough to warrant a place in current dictionaries. We have so many because humans value the ability to easily communicate. Furthermore we love them so much we borrow them other language and make up new ones at will when the ones we have don’t do the job at hand well enough or for the joy of being creative. Our needs sometimes change and we discard them or we misuse them often enough we come to dislike them. We forget them when we’re young and from disease as we age. When they disappear--for whatever reason, we tend to miss them, so we replace them with something else. But there are a few in the world who love them so much they keep records that have grown so there are too many for a single dictionary--or even a whole library large enough to handle them all--or large enough to make a claim that we haven’t missed a few as time passed. We have found the internet a good, but not perfect keeper of words for us.
That doesn’t mean authors might not need one of those forgotten, those discarded.
When a word can’t be found (or verified) we might just give up.
And when that happens our writing suffers because as authors we have special needs that the general population might not.
We need these words to put into the mouths of characters. Maybe characters who live in another English-speaking country or dialect-speaking region. Maybe characters were bring to life from another century, another era, another class. When we reach such an impasse, here are a few ways to conquer the problem:
~Ask your wife or even the person sitting next to you at Starbucks trying to get some writing done.
~Using keywords, look books published in past decades on Amazon’s New and used feature.
~I have a couple books of slang that I’ve stashed in my own real-life bookshelves. Some are out of print, but I’m keeping them safe.
~Ask people you know who are lots older—or younger—and see what they come up with.
~Makeup a word of your own. A poem called Jabberwocky made such words perfectly legitimate.
~Visit charity shops and buy old paperbacks for a dime. Start with Thesauri but anything including lists of words for specific purposes will do like one published only a few decades ago called The Describer’s Dictionary.
~Put marginalia in all your book and don’t go giving them to charity or anyone else.
~Build more bookshelves so you won’t feel obligated to clean house.
~And alphabetize your books in ways that will be meaningful to you decades from now. Or adopt librarians’ methods of categorizing them.
MORE ABOUT YOUR #WRITERSONTHEMOVE CONTRIBUTOR
The triptych that Amazon provides the authors of series
published by their KDP unit. It feels like bonus.
Once a month Carolyn Howard-Johnson shares something writer-related she hopes might save some author from embarrassment (or make the task of writing more fun or creative.) The third edition of The Frugal Editor from Modern History Press includes contact list magic. It is the second multi award-winning book in her multi award-winning HowToDoItFrugally Series of books for writers. Find it on Amazon’s new buy-page for series where the e-book is offered with one click in online’s version of a set of books. (The availability—free—of that new page for authors with book series that appear on KDP’s pages is another of her #FrugalBookPromoterTips.) The Frugal Editor has been fully updated including a chapter on how backmatter can be extended to help readers and nudge book sales. And watch for her new book on—you guessed it—word lists!
