Sometimes, symbols take the place of notes in the margins of my books.
I use lambda, the Greek “L,” for a word I don’t know or for an image I like. The words and images end up in a notebook.
As a result of that habit, I can tell you that a bumbailiff is a bailiff empowered to arrest debtors and that an aspergillum is a contraption, with a brush and can, used to sprinkle holy water.
No, I’m not saving words for my next conversation. I won’t speak them. I won’t write them, at least not in my own voice. But I think the practice of noticing such words makes me more aware of diction — the fact that different people use different words in telling a story.
That’s such an obvious thing you might wonder why I’d even mention it.
Have you ever read a line of dialog and had the sense that something wasn’t quite right? That the words the character is using somehow don’t match the character? That little doubt in a reader’s mind is fatal.
Diction is an obvious thing, an important thing. And getting it right in dialog is a harder than it looks.
(If you’re curious: I suspect that both bumbailiff and aspergillum came from the vocabulary of Robert Graves.)
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