What This Column Isn’t

Wordsmith / FRANK KRISHNER



Wordsmith is not a newspaper grammar lesson, nor a weekly dictionary. A smith is a person who fashions tools out of metal. A wordsmith is one who employs a healthy, vigorous word to take the place of a tattered, tired and worn out one. This column will explore words and their uses in simple language. It will help you get the feel and flavour of words to communicate better.

Have you noticed how you can describe one thing in so many ways that it sounds like a lot of different things? Amit, Karan, Sheila and Arif are eating a cake. Amit may say, “ Delicious!” Karan may describe it as ‘a bit oversweet and sticky’. Sheila may say it has a ‘delicate lemon flavour’ while Arif may say that it melts in his mouth!

Perhaps the most exciting thing about the English language is its wealth of words. It possesses all kinds – words that stretch, words that shrink; some that crawl and some that soar; silly ones and boisterous ones and melancholy ones; words to make you laugh or cry.

Whoever learns to use words well can use them as precisely as a surgeon uses a scalpel, as delicately as a musician uses a violin. And as powerfully as a warrior ever used a sword.
Your choice of words can change the tone of a statement. Who can’t see the difference, for example, between “Mother invited me to help clean the room” and “Mother told me to help clean the room”?

Think of the slight difference in the meaning of words that mean almost the same. Storehouse and treasury are words for a place in which you can save or store things. Whatever you want to save – furniture, newspapers, machinery – you put in a storehouse. You would put money or jewels or bars of gold in a treasury.

Your dictionary may be a storehouse of tired words worn from over-use. It is also a treasury, filled to the roof with good, vigorous, unused words. This column will walk you through the treasury.



Learn-a-word
Something that burns easily
FLAMMABLE [ æm∂b∂l] [adj] flammable chemicals, gases, and other materials burn easily and quickly and are therefore dangerous. Caution! Flammable substances. Highly flammable [= extremely flammable] Petrol is highly flammable.

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wordscore: unscramble these words [they all have something in common]

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