{"id":672,"date":"2013-07-07T11:44:58","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T15:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=672"},"modified":"2013-07-09T15:38:11","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T19:38:11","slug":"world-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=672","title":{"rendered":"Word Play"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Sunday paper’s Word Guy column started me musing about words in general and\u00a0 the April 29 New Yorker<\/i> essay by John McPhee (Draft No. 4<\/a>) that works its way around, in a McPhee-like peregrination, to commending \u201cle mot juste<\/i>,\u201d and the thrill writers feel when they find the exactly, precisely, inarguably very best word in meaning, connotation, and sound (extra points!) to express a particular thought. That article inspired me to put a \u201cfavorite word used today\u201d widget at the bottom of my website home page.<\/p>\n

McPhee doubts that a thesaurus will help much in extricating that perfect word from our farrago of a language. He prefers a dictionary, so he can delve into etymologies and associations, and is a fan of those paragraphs that shave the distinctions between, say, dark, dim, obscure, gloomy, and murky.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Visual Thesaurus<\/a> is a subscription site I use when the word I want is off napping somewhere in my brain. The definitions component of the site is weak, precisely because it doesn\u2019t adequately explore shades of meaning. But it\u2019s helpful in reminding me about extended word families, which helps me sneak up on a napping uncle and poke him awake.<\/p>\n

Visual Thesaurus has other pleasures, and allows some lucky folks to have the job of developing arcane word lists (\u201cTen Words from the New York Times<\/i> \u2013 July 3, 2013,\u201d a list that included autocrat, throes, culminate, and intransigence; \u201c\u2018Jabberwocky,\u2019 vocabulary from the poem\u201d; \u201c100 SAT words beginning with \u2018A\u2019\u201d; and the like). It has word games, a spelling bee, and VocabGrabber, which can create word clouds and perform other analyses.<\/p>\n

I dropped the 36,000 words of my novel-in-progress into VocabGrabber and found I\u2019ve used 2500 different words so far, 94 from the fields of social studies, 65 from arts and literature, 128 from science, and 13 from math (huh?). That doesn\u2019t add up. \u201cMisalign\u201d turned up at the bottom of the list based on \u201cfamiliarity,\u201d and it occurs in the book\u2019s first paragraph: \u201cbiding his time while the alcohol-soaked reception ratcheted forward on misaligned social wheels.\u201d Interesting, since \u201cratcheted\u201d is the word that\u2019s received question marks. It’s the bedraggled old words at the top of the frequency list that concern me most, though. I know, “When in doubt . . .”<\/p>\n

Lerner and Loewe have the last . . . well, you know<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sunday paper’s Word Guy column started me musing about words in general and\u00a0 the April 29 New Yorker essay by John McPhee (Draft No. 4) that works its way around, in a McPhee-like peregrination, to commending \u201cle mot juste,\u201d … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-aQ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=672"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":674,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/672\/revisions\/674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}