WORDS

If your teacher marks “WW,” you have misused a word or used the wrong form of a word. To correct the error, replace the incorrect word or phrase. You may need to use a dictionary or thesaurus.

WRONG: She is an elegant speaker.

RIGHT: She is an eloquent speaker.

WRONG: Police broke up the noisy raucous.

RIGHT: Police broke up the noisy ruckus.

Good writers are aware of connotations: the overtones of additional meaning that a word gains from the contexts in which readers have encountered it. Words close in denotation (dictionary meaning) can produce different effects due to their connotations. Some words are romantic in connotations; we associate them with poetry or fictional romances (like stories of King Arthur and the Round Table). Be sensitive to connotations. They know that the context determines which to use: “flee” or “scat,” “cute” or “lovely,” “swift” or “speedy.”

INAPPROPRIATE CONNOTATIONS: They decorated their home with beautiful fake flowers.

BETTER: They decorated their home with beautiful artificial flowers.

EXTRA HELP: Connotation Exercise

For each subject below, choose the more appropriate word.

Subject

An athlete who plays with a painful injury.

A widow learning her husband died in battle.

Hearing your national anthem.

Getting rid of an annoying fly.

Word Choice

“gutsy” or “valiant”?

“bawls” or “weeps”?

“uplifting” or “cheery”?

“kill” or “slay”?

WF: wrong form of word.

If your teacher marks “WF,” you have used the wrong form of a word. To correct the error, do not replace the incorrect word or phrase; use it in the correct form. Identify which of the following categories describes your error.

1. Wrong part of speech.

WRONG (verb): They are a dominate team.

RIGHT (adjective): They are a dominant team.

2. Wrong form of the word.

WRONG FORM: delicateness, hesitance, beautifuller, warmness

RIGHT FORM: delicacy, hesitancy, more beautiful, warmth

3. Needless suffix or prefix.

UNNECESSARY: self-confident, firstly, evilness, orientate

RIGHT: confident, first, evil, orient

4. Needless participle or gerund.

UNNECESSARY: angered, enthused, pleasing, burying

RIGHT: angry, enthusiastic, pleasant, burial

USAGE TIP: Verbs Formed from Nouns

The transformation of nouns into verbs is an inevitable fact of the evolution of English. We accept many such usages without thinking twice:

They vacationed in Sicily.

She medalled at the Winter Olympics.

The song debuted at number ten on the pop music charts.

Students can access their grades online.

A few generations ago, “motoring” offended some listeners. However little we may like “transitioning,” it seems firmly rooted in the dictionary. Some people still object to “contacting,” but “contact” entered English centuries before electronic means of communication. The verb has an advantage over “phoning” or “calling,” for it is convenient when the method of communication is irrelevant or unknown. Often we want to hear from people but would rather not receive a phone call or letter. Detractors of “impacting” have a more plausible case, for the noun suggests forceful physical contact, and the verb has little if any advantage over “affecting.”

Rightly or wrongly, though, many listeners will groan at expressions that are still in the process of winning acceptance. A few examples are “dialoguing,” “efforting,” “gifting,” “guilting,” and “parenting.” For academic writing, the Keables Guide recommends that you consider alternatives before you use nouns as verbs, gerunds and participles.

* * * * *

Voc: do not settle for meaningless or lifeless words.

Expand your vocabulary. Prefer specific and concrete diction to general and abstract diction, and action verbs to linking verbs (see rule LV below).

DRAB: Nobody liked him because a lot of people were saying bad things about him.

BETTER: False rumors tarnished his reputation.

GENERAL, ABSTRACT: She has negative emotions about her unsuccessful relationships.

SPECIFIC, CONCRETE: Memories of betrayed love eat at her insides like an ulcer.

Try an occasional metaphor:

UNIMAGINATIVE: The dresses models wear do not fit me.

METAPHOR: I cannot wedge my body into the dresses models wear.

LV: change linking verbs to action verbs.

Linking verbs (the various forms of “to be,” including “is,” “was,” “are,” “were”) drain energy from your writing.

LINKING VERBS: She is always right. She was an A student. I am jealous of her.

ACTION VERBS: She never misses a question. She reaped academic honors. I envy her.

Id: use proper idioms, especially idiomatic prepositions.

Do not guess at the right answer; check the dictionary, or ask someone who is likely to know:

WRONG: insight of, persuade into, symbolic to, based in, guilty for

RIGHT: insight into, persuade to, symbolic of, based on, guilty of

USAGE TIP: Idioms and Idiomatic Usage

Idioms are expressions peculiar to a language that may seem contrary to the rules of grammar or logic. An idiom’s meaning cannot be inferred from the meaning of its separate words. It can be a metaphor like “kick the bucket” or “bury the hatchet.” The word “idiomatic” refers to the usage accepted as correct in a particular language. Idioms can be eccentric; one verb might require “to” while another does not:

WRONG: Rain made us to cancel the game.

RIGHT: Rain made us cancel the game.

WRONG: Rain caused us cancel the game.

RIGHT: Rain caused us to cancel the game.

* * * * *

J: avoid jargon and pretentious language.

Good users of English do not adopt every new expression they hear. They discard expressions that they have outgrown. They listen and read critically, staying alert for abuses of language, like the ones listed below. Inflated words like the ones below make us wonder if the writer is insecure and trying to impress us. What else could make a person talk about “plethoras”?

PRETENTIOUS: facilitate, finalize, plethora, prevalent, transpire

BETTER: help, finish, many, rare, happen

JARGON: ego, traumatize, parameter, paranoid, phobia

BETTER: pride, upset, limit, worried, fear

Stilted is a term for language that is so stiffly formal that it sounds unnatural:

STILTED: We possess the conception albeit not the means wherewith it shall be effected.

NATURAL: We have an idea, but we lack the money to carry it out.

USAGE TIP: Jargon

In a strict definition, jargon is technical terminology used outside its specialized field. The word has come to have the broader meaning of language that is circumlocutious (wordy, roundabout) or pompous, with big, unfamiliar words that seem to be selected to impress or intimidate. People often associate jargon with the social sciences, but it can come from many fields:

PSYCHOLOGY: compulsive, delusional, denial, dysfunctional, syndrome

POP PSYCHOLOGY: dialoguing, parenting, quality time, self-esteem

JOURNALISM: viable, worst-case scenario

MATHEMATICS: parameter

For more information, visit the Mall of Clichés, if you dare.

Dante’s Inferno, Canto III, illustration (1861) by Gustave Doré.

* * * * *

Inf: avoid informal diction, slang, and regional expressions.

The diction in the examples below fails to do justice to its subjects:

INFORMAL: Zeus gets mad at guys who get cocky.

BETTER: Arrogant mortals fall victim to the wrath of Zeus.

INFORMAL: Jack the Ripper was really mean.

BETTER: Jack the Ripper was cruelly sadistic.

INFORMAL: In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s auntie is more mature than her mom.

BETTER: In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth’s aunt is more mature than her mother.

INFORMAL: Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit, and the Lord was not okay with that.

BETTER: The Lord condemned the human race to suffering, toil and death.

Academic and professional writing require a level of formality. In formal writing, “kid” means a baby goat, not a child.

INAPPROPRIATE: George W. Bush became President eight years after his dad left the White House.

BETTER: George W. Bush became President eight years after his father left the White House.

INAPPROPRIATE: When the Summit ended without an agreement, it seemed like a blown opportunity.

BETTER: When the Summit ended without an agreement, it seemed like a missed opportunity.

In the right spots, slang terms can be effective. However, most are vague in meaning; many of them mean little more than “good” or “bad.” Moreover, slang is short-lived. “Cool” and “goof off” may not yet be out of fashion, but “split”(“leave”), “crash” (“sleep”) and “far out”are already dated, and “swell”and “neat-o”sound like a situation comedy from 1960.

Use regional expressions with care. Some terms familiar in the place where you live may not be familiar to a general audience.

Cont: write out contractions.

Although they are appearing more often in formal writing, contractions still give writing an air of informality. In many writing situations it is better to write out the contracted words:

INFORMAL: aren’t, can’t, he’s, she’ll

BETTER: are not, cannot, he is, she will

Note that “cannot” is always spelled as one word in modern standard usage.

CL: avoid clichés.

Trite expressions and ideas undermine readers’ confidence in a writer. If you find that a story begins “It was a dark and stormy night” (and that the writer is not making a joke), you may not want to read any further.

CLICHÉS: few and far between, leave no stone unturned, through thick and thin

ACADEMIC CLICHÉS: in our society today, is no exception, play a role in, prime example

POETIC CLICHÉS: crack of dawn, gentle breeze, ruby lips

CLICHÉS FROM FICTION: little did she know, beneath his mild-mannered exterior

Figures of speech can be clichés too. The metaphor “on an emotional roller coaster” once sounded clever, but now it makes thoughtful listeners groan.

TRITE METAPHORS: pillar of strength, turn over a new leaf, wake-up call

TRITE SIMILES: as cold as ice, as innocent as a lamb, as white as snow

TRITE HYPERBOLES: cost a fortune, starved to death, devastated, incredible

USAGE TIP: Overused Similes

MxM: avoid mixed metaphors.

Careless use of figures of speech (especially trite ones) produces mixed metaphors, which can be absurd:

Love is the key to success that shrivels on the vine of a stagnant marriage.

She moves with the grace of a finely tuned hunting animal.

She is shutting herself out from moving on.

Keys do not grow on vines, and “finely tuned” describes a musical instrument or machine, not a hunting animal. One solution is to stick to one metaphor. “She moves with the grace of a greyhound” is still unoriginal, but at least it will not make readers laugh at your writing. A better solution is to find an original metaphor.

RX: Avoid distracting rhymes and sentences that sound awkward when read aloud.

Always imagine the way your writing would sound if you read it aloud. Writers who do not listen to their words may choke their readers with clumsy and unpronounceable phrases.

AWKWARD: He imagines Lady Macbeth’s last breath on the fast path to death.

USAGE TIP: The English Department

Samuel Johnson (1709-84)

One of the greatest writers of any age, Johnson was the sole author of the first great dictionary of the English language. It was an amazing achievement by a single man, but inevitably it includes errors and quirks. Johnson’s love of Latin roots made him include words like denominable and discubitory, and offer some definitions (cough: “a convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity”) that leave you no wiser than you were before.

At the conclusion to its Preface, Johnson wrote, “The English Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow; and it may repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human powers have hitherto completed. [. . .] I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please, have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds; I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquility, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.”

Noah Webster (1758-1843)

America’s greatest lexicographer. Besides publishing dictionaries, he reformed education, encouraged Americanized spellings, and promoted American cultural awareness. He learned twenty-six languages. Aside from his dictionaries, Webster made a fortune on a spelling book that helped establish American spellings: honor, theater, plow, tire, jail, and judgment. Had Webster adopted Ben Franklin’s proposed spelling rules, we might today write iz, ritten, proov and wurd. Schoolchildren stood and read together from Webster’s spelling book and held spelling contests; the losers swept the rooms and built the fires.

Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869)

Best known for compiling the first modern thesaurus (1852), Roget was also a physician, a scientist whose research on perception of moving objects influenced the development of motion pictures, a mathematician who invented a form of slide rule that allowed calculations of roots and exponents, and a brilliant chess player.

After more than four decades of compiling lists of words, Roget was sixty-nine when he began preparing his thesaurus for publication. His system of classification sorts words into six primary classes: (a) abstract relations, (b) space, (c) matter, (d) the intellectual faculties, (e) the voluntary powers, (e) the sentient and moral powers. Each class has many subdivisions.

A thesaurus is a reference work that groups words similar in meaning. The term is not related to “dinosaur.” It comes from a late sixteenth-century New Latin phrase meaning “treasury of words” and derives from a Greek word meaning “treasury, collection, or storehouse.”

The OED

Every serious humanities student is aware of the Oxford English Dictionary or OED. In the Victorian age a group of British scholars set out to identify every word that had ever been printed, along with every new usage of every word, and to record quotations. Many of the words have been out of use for centuries. Conceived in 1857, planned in 1879, it was completed in 1928. A small-print two-volume edition comes with a magnifying glass. Work on an all-new edition is underway, with an estimated completion date of 2037.

Sir James Murray (1837-1915)

Murray was the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, on which he worked from 1879 until he died in 1915. Working long before computers, they collected quotations on individual slips of paper that ended up numbering 2.5 million. He is pictured here in his “Scriptorium,” the corrugated iron building in which he and his team worked. Murray did not live to see the completion of the first edition in 1928.

When he was applying for a job at the British Museum, he said he knew to varying degrees Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin, Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal, Dutch, German, Danish, Anglo-Saxon, Mœso-Gothic, Slavonic, Russian, Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician.

Page updated

Report abuse