The Century Vocabulary Builder · Chapter 12VII
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In considering pairs we have, without using the word, been studying synonyms. For most pairs are synonyms (or in some instances antonyms) that hunt in couples. We must now deal with synonyms, and incidentally antonyms, as they associate themselves in larger groups.
A vocabulary is impoverished. Why? Nine times in ten, because of a disregard of synonyms. Listen to the talk of the average person. Whatever is pleasing is fine or nice or all to the good; whatever is displeasing is bum or awful or a fright. Life is reflected, not as noble and complex, but as mean and meager. Out of such stereotyped utterance only the general idea emerges. The precise meaning is lazily or incompetently left to the hearer to imagine. The precise meaning? There is none. A person who does not take the trouble to speak clearly has not taken the trouble to think clearly.
But the master of synonyms expresses, instead of general, hazy, commonplace conceptions, the subtlest shadings of thought and feeling. He has so trained himself that he selects, it may be unconsciously, from a throng of possible words. One word may be strong, another weak. One may be broad, another narrow. One may present an alternative in meanings, another permit no liberty of choice. One may be suggestive, another literal or colorless. One may penetrate to the core of the idea, another strike only in the environs. With these possibilities the master of synonyms reckons. He must have the right word. He chooses it, not at haphazard, but in conformity with a definite purpose.
For synonyms are not words that have the same meaning. They are words that have similar meanings. They may be compared to circles that overlap but do not coincide. Each embraces a common area, but each embraces also an area peculiar to itself. Though many words cluster about a given idea, rarely if ever are even two of these words entirely equivalent to each other. In scope, in suggestion, in emotional nuance, in special usage, or what not, is sure to lurk some denial of perfect correspondence. And of synonyms, so of antonyms. Antonyms are words opposite in meaning; but the opposition, for the same reasons as the likeness, is seldom or never absolute.
In your study of synonyms you will find most of the dictionaries previously named of great help. You may also profitably consult the following books of synonyms (heavy, scholastic works not suited for ordinary use are omitted):
<Books of Plain Synonyms and Antonyms>
Edith B. Ordway: Synonyms and Antonyms. A compact, practical volume, with antonyms (in italics for contrast) immediately following synonyms.
Louis A. Flemming: Putnam's Word Book. A book of the ordinarily used synonyms of words, with antonyms after some of them, and with lists of associated words wherever these are likely to be useful.
Samuel Fallows: 100,000 Synonyms and Antonyms. A handy little volume, with useful lists of various kinds in appendices.
Richard Soule: Dictionary of English Synonyms [revised and enlarged by George H. Howison]. A much larger and more expensive book than the others, and less practical for ordinary use, but fuller in treatment of material, with words of more than one meaning carefully divided into their various senses.
<Synonyms with Word Discriminations>
George Crabb: English Synonyms. A standard volume for over 100 years. Has close distinctions, but is somewhat scholarly for ordinary use. Revised edition of 1917, omitting illustrative quotations from literature, not so good as editions before that date.
James C. Fernald: English Synonyms, Antonyms, and Prepositions. A pleasing book to read, with much information about the use of words and their shades of meaning (with exercises), also with proper prepositions to follow words. Material taken from the Standard Dictionary.
Peter Mark Roget: Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. Issued in many editions and revisions. Words grouped under general ideas. An excellent book for serious and laborious study, but not for quick use.
<How to Acquire Synonyms>
The best principle for the extension of one's mastery of synonyms is the principle already used over and over in this book—that of proceeding from the known to the unknown. It is the fundamental principle, indeed, of any kind of successful learning. We should build on what we have, fit each new piece of material into the structure already erected. But normally it is our ill fortune to learn through chance rather than through system. We perceive elucidation here, draw an inference there. These isolated fragments of knowledge may mislead rather than inform us.
The principle of proceeding from the known to the unknown may be applied to synonyms in various ways. Two of these—the two of most importance—we must consider here.
First, you should reckon with your personal, demonstrated needs. Just as you have already analyzed your working vocabulary for its general limits and shortcomings, so should you analyze it with particular reference to your poverty in synonyms. Watch your actual speech; make a list of the words—nouns, verbs, and adjectives particularly—that you employ again and again. Make each of these words the starting-point for a linguistic exploring expedition. First, write the word down. Then under it write all the synonyms that come forthwith to your mind. These constitute your present available stock; in speaking or writing you could, if you kept yourself mentally alert, summon them on the moment. But the list, as you know, is not exhaustive. Draw a line under it and subjoin such synonyms as come to you after reflection. These constitute a second stock, not instantaneously available, yet to be tagged as among your resources. Next add a list of the synonyms you find through research, through a ransacking of dictionaries and books of synonyms. This third stock, but dimly familiar if familiar at all, is in no practical sense yours. And indeed some of the words are too abstruse, learned, or technical for you to burden your memory with them. But many—most—are worth acquiring. By writing down the words of these three classes you have done something to stamp them upon your memory as associates. You must now make it your business to bring them into use. Never call upon them for volunteers, but like a wise commander summon the individual that can rightly perform a particular service. Thus will your speech, perhaps vague and indolent now, become exact, discriminating, competent, vital.
In the second place, you should obtain specific and detailed command of general ideas. Not of out-of-the-way ideas. But of the great basic ideas that are the common possession of all mankind. For through these basic ideas is the most natural and profitable approach to the study of synonyms. Each of them is represented by a generic word. So elementary are idea and word alike that a person cannot have the one in mind without having the other ready and a-quiver on his tongue. Every person is master of both. But it is unsafe to predicate the person's acquaintance with the shades and phases of the idea, or with the corresponding discriminations in language. He may not know them at all, he may know them partially, he may know them through and through. Let us suppose him ignorant of them but determined to learn. His progress, both in the thought and in the language, will be from the general to the specific. His acquaintance with the idea in the large he will gradually extend to an acquaintance with it in detail, and his command of the broad term for it he will little by little supplement with definite terms for its phases. An illustration will make this clear.
We are aware that the world is made up of various classes and conditions of men. How did we learn this? Let us go back to the time when our minds were a blank, when we were babes and sucklings, when we had not perceived that men exist, much less that mankind is infinitely complex. A baby comes slowly to understand that all objects in the universe are divisible into two classes, human and non-human, and that a member of the former may be separated from the others and regarded as an individual. It has reached the initial stage of its knowledge on the subject; it has the basic idea, that of the individual human being. As soon as it can speak, it acquires a designating term—not of course the sophisticated human being, but the simpler man. It uses this word in the generic sense, to indicate any member of the human race; for as yet it knows nothing and cares nothing about differences in species. With increasing enlightenment, however, it discerns five species, and distinguishes among them by swelling this branch of its vocabulary to five words: man (in the sense of adult male), woman, boy, girl, baby. (To be sure, it may chance to have acquired a specific term, as boy or baby, before the generic term man; but if so, it has attached this term to some particular individual, as the grocer's boy or itself, rather than to the individuals of a species. Its understanding of the species as a species comes after its understanding of the genus.) As time passes, it divides mankind into yet further species by sundry other methods: according to occupation, for example, as doctors, chauffeurs, gardeners; to race or color, as white men; negroes, Malays, Chinese; to disposition, as heroes, gift-givers, teasers, talkers; and so on. It perceives moreover that species are made up of sub-species. Thus instead of lumping all boys together it begins to distinguish them as big boys, little boys, middle-sized boys, boys in long trousers, boys in short trousers, barefoot boys, schoolboys, poor boys, rich boys, sick boys, well boys, friends, enemies, bullies, and what not. It even divides the sub-species. Thus it classifies schoolboys as bright boys, dullards, workers, shirkers, teachers' favorites, scapegoats, athletes, note-throwers, truant-players, and the like. And of these classes it may make yet further sub-divisions, or at least it may separate them into the individuals that compose them. In fine, with its growing powers and experience, it abandons its old conception that all persons are practically alike, and follows human nature through the countless ramifications of man's status, temperament, activities, or fate. And it augments its vocabulary to keep pace, roughly at least, with its expanding ideas. In thought and terminology alike its growth is from genus to species.
So it is with all our ideas and with all our words to cap them. We radiate from an ascertained center into new areas of knowledge; we proceed from the broad, fundamental, generic to the precise, discriminatory, specific. Upon this natural law are based the exercises in this chapter and the two to follow. The starting-point is always a word representative of an elementary idea—a word and an idea which everybody knows; the advance is into the unknown or the unused, at any rate into the particular. Now fundamental ideas are not very numerous, and these exercises include the commoner ones. Such a method of studying synonyms must therefore yield large and tangible results.
One matter, however, should be explained. Most books of synonyms start with a word and list all the terms in any way related to it. The idea of the compilers is that the more they give the student the more they help him. But oftentimes by giving more than is strictly pertinent they actually hinder and confuse him. They may do this in various ways, of which two must be mentioned. First, they follow an idea too far afield. Thus in listing the synonyms of love they include such terms as kindness and lenity, words only through stretched usage connected with love. Secondly, they trace, not one meaning of a word, but two or more unrelated meanings when the word chances to possess them. Thus in listing the synonyms of cry they include both the idea of weeping and the idea of calling or screaming. What are the results of these methods? The student finds a clutter where he expects rationalized order; he finds he must exclude many words which lie in the borders and fringes of the meaning. Moreover he finds mere chance associations mingled with marked kinships. In both cases he finds dulled distinctions.
This book offers synonyms that are apropos and definite rather than comprehensive. Starting with a basic idea, it finds the generic term; it then disregards dim and distant relationships, confines itself rigorously to one of perhaps two or three legitimate senses, and refuses to consider the peculiar twists and devious ways of subsidiary words when they wander from the idea it is tracing. It thus deliberately blinds itself to much that is interesting. But this partial blindness enables it to concentrate attention upon the matter actually under study, to give sharper distinctions and surer guidance.