As I grew up, I read. As I read, I encountered new words. Early on, I just absorbed the words, mostly making guesses about meanings based on context. Eventually, I put a dictionary in my bedroom so I could be more certain of the actual definitions.
While I've been re-reading the Thomas Covenant series, I have been reminded of this experience, because the author, Stephen R Donaldson, has a very large vocabulary. I remember that it was in the course of reading Lord Foul's Bane I first learned the words "mien" and "ichor" and "anathema." These words occurred so frequently, knowing their true meaning was necessary to truly understanding the book.
But Donaldson does love his words, and every once in a while, he lays down a paragraph which would have sent me to a dictionary three or four times if I really wanted to know all the words. But sometimes it was simply easier to guess at meanings and plunge along.
A paragraph 400+ pages into The Illearth War contained these words:
and the next paragraph had
The story was at a critical point, and I simply jumped over the words. I don't think I missed much, but I decided as I was encountering these paragraphs that I would bookmark the page and come back to them later.
Of course, there are words in the paragraphs, and in the surrounding paragraphs, which are part of my working vocabulary which might be unknown to others. As a writer, it's a challenge to use excellent vocabulary -- words which fit the purpose of the narrative so well they must be used -- and yet avoid words which will jar your reader out of the story. Donaldson's hero, Thomas Covenant, is a writer, so it makes sense that his mind would use extraordinary words.
Thankfully, not every author has such a surfeit of entries in his lexicon.
And yes, that was a joke.
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[And, disappointingly, even Donaldson misuses the word "sojourn." So can we really be sure he meant to use those other unusual words properly? Yes, I think we can. The misuse of "sojourn" as a synonym for "journey" is a pet peeve of mine.]
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1 comment:
OMG it gets much much worse in the second trilogy, which I remember got so bad I began writing the words down in order to look them up later; words like chatoyant, concatenation, ameliorate, carnassial. (I borrowed the last one for my own writing, tee-hee.
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