Dave's Corner

In the recollection he shared for this vocabulary builder, Dr. David McAuley had memorized the dictionary by the age of eighteen. For years afterward, its passages remained remarkably accessible to him. During college, his teachers were often surprised that he could respond to questions about a newly introduced topic by recalling something he had read in that original dictionary.

As the years passed, he developed a more playful way to keep that knowledge within reach. He wrote long passages filled with expressive words and their synonyms, sometimes describing an entirely fictitious situation and sometimes letting one deliberately discordant paragraph follow another. (discordant: clashing, incongruous, incompatible) The point was not to produce a polished novel. It was to put familiar words back to work.

Dave's Corner carries that personal exercise into this vocabulary builder. The original stories draw on the vocabulary, situations, and word associations in his study notes. The Fresh encounters collection adds new fictional situations for less-revisited words. Highlighted terms are paired with synonyms or short equivalents, so a reader can compare meanings without constantly leaving the passage.

You can see the habit at work in the first reading. A committee announces a promising new workshop. There will be forty students, a portrait of the chairman, and no tables. Mara, the carpenter, spots the disparity between what the committee spent on signs and what it set aside for tools. (disparity: imbalance, discrepancy, gap) She asks for a review before anyone buys another portrait. You could call the budgets different. Disparity gives Mara a reason to speak up: one has been favored at the expense of the other.

What a change of word can do

Try a fresh example in the spirit of Dave's notebook. At a railway station, a band plays a jaunty march. Across the platform a family stands in silence as the last train pulls away. The trumpet player notices, lowers his instrument, and lets the final note go unfinished. The music sounds discordant here even if every note is in tune. (discordant: clashing, incongruous) What jars is the distance between the tune and the farewell.

Later, someone asks the trumpet player why he stopped. He says, "They were saying goodbye." Call his answer laconic and you draw attention to how few words he uses. (laconic: terse, succinct, brief) Call him reticent and you suggest he has more to say but would prefer to keep it to himself. (reticent: reserved, guarded, uncommunicative) A reader could defend either choice. To decide between them, listen to the next line. Does he cheerfully tell the rest of the story, or does he put his trumpet away and change the subject?

That question makes a good place to begin a notebook of your own. Take a line you like, exchange a single word for its nearest neighbor, and read it aloud again. Sometimes a change as small as brusque in place of laconic can make the very same reply sound unkind. (brusque: curt, abrupt, blunt)

Dr. McAuley supplied the recollection about his dictionary, college years, and writing habit. The numbered stories are fictional adaptations of vocabulary and themes. The railway scene is a new fictional illustration.