turbine

October 27, 2010

bobulate:

“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”

— Stephen King

I’d agree with this if he’d substituted “exceptions” with “benefits.”

Rules that discourage people from learning new things produce better Maoists than writers.

[said the web’s most vocal fan of On Writing.]

I often tell my students to throw out their thesauruses. The fancy sounding words they substitute for regular ones often have wide-ranging connotations, sometimes derived from something as simple as the word’s component phonemes.

The best thesaurus is tough reading that makes you look things up in the dictionary. For example, I learned the word “Traduce” from an old translation of Kafka’s The Trial: “Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.”

Compare that to this shitty Vintage Press edition from the early 90s: “Someone must have been spreading lies about Joseph K. because even though he didn’t do anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning.”

I’m glad they decided to keep “one fine morning” as the closer, because it makes the sentence that much more Kafkaesque (compare those to the one listed in 100 greatest opening lines: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” We get that he was arrested. We can’t have The Trial without an arrest. But, man, that it happened one fine morning—that’s what gives it impact, and it’s best to have that impact at the end.). Beyond that, however, it just doesn’t sing like the older version.

The point I’m trying to make in my most roundabout way is a simple one: cobble your own thesaurus by reading smart work critically and using a good dictionary.

9:12am | URL: http://tmblr.co/ZlJiby1KLhe1

(Notes: 151)