Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Expanding my vocabulary

So lately I've been feeling as though my vocabulary is somewhat limited. It seems to me as though I continually use the same words in all different circumstances. There's no variety in what I'm saying. So... in order to be pro-active in this situation. I've begun to make a habit of checking in the thesaurus for new words when I catch myself using the same one all the time (take notes by the way, this is how you become really cool like me...). For example, yesterday I realized that whenever something is well... rather large, I generally say it's "huge". Right? So I decided that it was time to do something about this. My fingers flew and there I was on thesaurus.com with "huge" in the entry box. Seconds later I had a list of synonyms in front of my eyes. I had to laugh out loud because there, right after "brobdingnagian" and "behemothic" followed "big mother". BIG MOTHER!? I think that it is rather hilarious that "big mother" could possibly make it into the thesaurus. Why would Lexico Publishing group want to insert such a derogatory phrase with mothers as the target, into their thesaurus? I think it's safe to say that there were no mothers on the editing team. I can't say, that in an attempt to broaden my usage of the vast amount of words in the English language, I will begin using "big mother". See, I've already been saying "big mother" for quite some time now, however, little did I know that as I was using that term, I was in fact being... correct? Anyways, there was only one synonym for the word "huge" that I think I will take with me into my every day word list; "colossal". I think I could hack it. I'm going to consider my vocabulary colossally expanded.

1 comment:

Jeff said...

Let me see if i understand by using this word in a sentance. "the hole that Vanessa ripped in her jeans was colossal"
Yes that does sound nice dosnt it.