I’m not making the last one up, by the way. Psychologist Dr. James W. Pennebaker has done precisely that analysis. It’s part of a larger project to—by my analogy—analyze one’s verbal handwriting. Pennebaker has developed ways to analyze everything from Beatles lyrics to Al-Qaeda memos based on specific words used and their frequency.

Dr. Pennebaker assigns words to such categories as “positive emotion,” “anxiety,” “causal,” “insight,” “inhibition” and “likely to lead to high Scrabble scores.” Well, maybe not the last one. Anyway, pretty interesting stuff—check New York Times coverage for specifics. And check his blog for analysis devoted to the presidential conversation.

Oh yeah. Most big words in the second debate? McCain 17.88% of words used to Obama’s 17.17%. Obama says uh a lot—does that fit into the tally?

Stop!

PLEASE don’t use a thesaurus. It does terrible things to your writing. Yes, that’s right. Do yourself a favour and forget about thesauruses. They’re harmful unless used correctly.

Thanks for saving me from myself. That’s from an article by Grant Barrett in the Malaysia Star. Barrett contends that a thesaurus leads you to selecting haughty or imprecise words, or flashy words you haven’t used before and have that new-car smell. These are all dangers, I agree. All tools have dangers. But using a razor doesn’t force you to shave off your eyebrows; using a thesaurus doesn’t force you to select the wrong word.

Barrett’s cautions aren’t (what’s the word I’m looking for? oh—here’s a good one) hidebound. And in fact he makes a superb point that individual words do not substitute for clear, precise writing. The right reasons to use a thesaurus are many:

• Discover nuance. The parenthetical above wasn’t me being a smartass. I indeed went to a thesaurus to find hidebound to communicate inflexibility. I liked the tight-skinned implications of the word I found in my search.
• Enrich your vocabulary. Perhaps you’ll find a word or two you’d not encountered before. Barrett dismisses the thesaurus in part because “no thesaurus that I know—I own more than a dozen—has definitions in the thesaurus entries.” Granted. But a tome that included a definition for each word would be monstrous and unpublishable. So turn to the tool dedicated to that purpose. Look up new words in the dictionary. (And the smartass in me wants to ask why someone who finds thesauruses potentially harmful owns more than a dozen of them—wants to, but I’ll resist. Sort of.)
• Enrich your understanding of the range of the language. Perhaps you’ll encounter words you know, but hadn’t realized were related to the word you’re looking up. As a hypothetical, imagine someone looking up atrocity and discovering the expected abomination and the unexpected enormity. “That means ‘real big,’ doesn’t it?” our hypothetical writer might think. No, it doesn’t.
• Increase your humility. Sometimes the word you know is perfect is not perfect at all. Return to our hypothetical thesaurus consultation, and this time picture the writer looking up enormity to begin with.
• Become practiced with writing tools. Use a razor but once in a while, and you’re apt to cut yourself. Use it daily, and shaving becomes efficient; the results cleaner, more acceptable. The thesaurus, the dictionary, the rhyming dictionary, the grammar guide, the etymological dictionary—use all regularly (and not just one of each—a dozen or more sometimes suffices) to learn their strengths, deficiencies, goals and assistances, and you can use each tool like a fine razor to pare down to the most precise words and wordings—a hallmark goal of concise writing.

In fact, a danger far greater than using a thesaurus is not using it enough.

LEXICO’GRAPHER. n.s. A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and signification of words.

Such wonderful drudgery is the focus of wordorigins.org, and Wilton’s Word Myths—one of the sources for Everything You Know About English Is Wrong. For example, Wrong turns to Wilton for his delightful debunking of a “word history” internet post, “Life in the 1500s.” In its latest edition, The Harmless Drudge points out to those of us fascinated by wrong-wrong-wrong that bordello and brothel, despite similarities in spelling and meaning, are not etymologically related. (I’ll chat a bit further about brothel—the word and not the commercial endeavor—in an upcoming post.)

Anyway, the newsletter is back, and ready for your subscription, which I recommend. A quick wordorigins.org directory for your use and reference:

• wordorigins.org, “dedicated to the promotion of accurate and well-researched information on etymology and phrase origins for the lay reader”
• the Harmless Drudge blog
• the wordorigins.com forum

And a bonus incentive to check into these resources: The most recent Harmless Drudge also tells us, though indirectly, why “two bits” is both 25 cents and half a nybble.