I read quite a bit and I encounter words that I hadn’t seen before pretty regularly. There’s a fair amount of words that I have seen, but have since been lost to the abyss that is flagging memory as well. My inclination is always to carry on reading, ignoring the word itself and instead choosing to infer the intent of the author from context. Generally this is fairly efficacious, but on occasion a saucy bugger comes along that rebuffs attempts to decrypt its meaning. Historically I chose to move along even in these situations, the lack of comprehension arising from the haze of ignorance somehow preferable to admitting my vocabulary is inadequate. I suspect this behavior is related to the psychological displeasure associated with admitting any of my many inadequacies. Whatever the case, I am breaking free of the chains of nescience.
Whenever I read now, I keep a dictionary close at hand. If I stumble on a word, I locate its definition. This has the benefit not only of clarifying otherwise intractable prose, but also of improving my own diction when the time comes to do some expressing of my own ideas. It’s surprising how often I find myself searching in vain for a word to express an idea just so, often resorting to an inscrutable amalgam of words where one, the right one, would have served superbly. More than once my newfound enamor of vocabulary has saved me in such situations. Thus I am introducing the Word of the Post. To augment my efforts, I will include one obscure word along with its definition in each post I write henceforth. And so, without further verbiage, on to the Word of the Post.
discursive (dis cur sive) [di-skur-siv] -adjective
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passing aimlessly from one subject to another; digressive; rambling.
- proceeding by reason or argument rather than intuition.
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