I’ve been browsing through(/leafingthrough/dipping into/turning the pages of) Roget’s Thesaurus, and as is usual(routine/customary) when opening any kind of (dictionary/lexicon/concordance), am appalled(/vexed/aggrieved/bothered/distressed) by the narrowness of my active written vocabulary. You’d think that active vocabulary would increase just by exposure to what is read. Perhaps one needs to write when reading – an idea countering what many advise in case one’s writing is infected. Although, I suppose, if one is attempting to broaden one’s active vocabulary, one would like to be infected.

The problem is that one picks up another’s phrasing and cadence as well as the lexical.

There’s an awful lot involved in writing and speaking: it isn’t just a case of being able to label and name (contra St Augustine); or label, name and pop into a given grammar (contra Chomsky). Vocabulary and tense are just the beginning. You have to learn about collocation and register; and, in order to develop a voice, you need to learn how how to manipulate and exploit both. I wonder how it all happens; and whether it’s something anyone can learn to do, at any stage in one’s development. Chomsky says not: but then he’s welded to grammatical syntax, while I think (or perhaps, I think that I think) there’s something even more interesting going on – something much messier, and more akin to a lexical syntax.

But – and this is a big but – does a lexical syntax fare any better? Doesn’t connotation feature rather large in all this? Meaning as use? (Once again, I’m back to what might be loosely termed Wittgenstein’s ‘first principles’ (although I doubt he’d have approved).)

Coincidentally, while I was thinking about words and whatnot, someone sent me an email containing the following:

Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can raed tihs.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!