A. D. SHEFFIELD, 1938

5. Managing a word to make  it the best

The word that turns out to be best for one's purpose may be made  best by one's management of its present context in writing. Any word - even such as "hiss with sibilants, or scrunch with lumps of grinding consonants, or dribble off into weak trickles of unaccented syllables" - may be so placed that it is caught up into a redeeming rhythm, or contributes its dissonance to some patterned contrast; as where the salt-caked smokestack  of Masefield's "dirty British coaster" -

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,

comes with telling vigor after the quinquireme of Nineveh ,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine.

It is not necessarily the finding of some exceptional word that counts. With the choices before one, one can often contrive, for a quite ordinary word, a phrasing which, as C. E. Montague says, will " re-impregnate " it with a " super-normal expressiveness " such as Shakespeare achieves in

                                         the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world.

But such a wizardry of expression with seeming-simple words only goes to show that any word has latencies of meaning beyond the meaning a dictionary gives it - however full and precise the definition may be. Its actual meaningfulness in a given context may represent an outreach from the sense and feeling stamped by its average  uses to some implication, emotion, and hint of relationship that emerges  in this  use. This fact suggests that a dictionary of synonyms can make a unique contribution to the consultant's power with words. By simply displaying in each list the words that offer the recognized variations of meaning  which accrue to one core-sense, the synonymy intimates the variations of context  that invite fresh permutations of imagery and phrase. For example, the synonymy for the notion "brevity of speech" offers us brief, concise, succinct, laconic, pithy, terse, epigrammatic, sententious, curt, short. These words conspire, just by their collocation, to suggest possibilities in the experience of speech-brevity - such as may changeably link it with simple pressure of time, or with taciturn habit, or artistic economy, or rudeness, or rebuke. These are all facets of by-sense, hinting metaphorical turns which will put a new complex matter in just the right light. The user of a book which thus sets words, group by group, to mutual elucidations will find with pleasure that his progress in diction is being surprisingly speeded up.

A. D. SHEFFIELD

The Writer's Cabinet

Meaningfulness

Usability

Core-sense & synonym cluster

Beyond limits

Making  a word the best


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