Tuesday, January 19, 2016

vocabulary - How do authors gain strong familiarity with archaic and extremely rare words?


I keep thinking about this because I've lately been reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and it's just ridiculous. I have to look up 1-2 words per sentence sometimes, something I'm only used to doing for Joyce. Apparently McCarthy is well known for doing this sort of thing.


The book was written in the mid-1980s -- it's modern. But the terms used therein belong to another time, and are mostly unknown to modern English.


How do authors pick up such a broad vocabulary of words that they can effectively disguise themselves as a hundred years older than they are? These words can't be used in day-to-day speech; nobody would understand you. If you can't use them, how do you remember them?



Examples from Blood Meridian: rebozo, shellalegh, hackamore, osnaburg, bungstarter, weskit, jacal, farrier, escopeta, caesura. Not a single one of these words have I ever heard reference to anywhere else in my entire tour of existence.



Answer



Read a lot of archaic and extremely rare books, take notes, and make a point of using your list as a thesaurus. Practice using your list by writing paragraphs or stories as exercises just to get used to where the words fit.


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