I was packing up old notebooks earlier this year and found one filled with pages and pages of words that I intended to look up. A lot of them seemed to come from reading Norman Mailer during my first year of college. I must have looked up the words because I "know" them now and find they are part of my regular vocabulary.
Btw, have you seen that new edition of Ginsberg's early journals? It contains a long 3pp list of "sexual vocubulary" compiled when he was about 18 years old.
i've been reading, for work, about how vocabulary is learned and retained, as well as how it carries meaning in prose. it's delightfully mysterious but, i guess, frustrating too.
last night while watching hockey an announcer used the word donnybrook -- that's a nice one. hornswoggle seems pretty similar to it.
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I was packing up old notebooks earlier this year and found one filled with pages and pages of words that I intended to look up. A lot of them seemed to come from reading Norman Mailer during my first year of college. I must have looked up the words because I "know" them now and find they are part of my regular vocabulary.
Btw, have you seen that new edition of Ginsberg's early journals? It contains a long 3pp list of "sexual vocubulary" compiled when he was about 18 years old.
And I can't resist this word from reading Dreiser's Sister Carrie this morning: hornswoggle.
i've been reading, for work, about how vocabulary is learned and retained, as well as how it carries meaning in prose. it's delightfully mysterious but, i guess, frustrating too.
last night while watching hockey an announcer used the word donnybrook -- that's a nice one. hornswoggle seems pretty similar to it.
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