Connecting with friends on social networking sites can severely limit one’s vocabulary. I find myself using the words ‘awesome’, ‘lovely’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘fabulous’ with sincere but tiresome monotony. To ‘comment’ on a friend’s picture henceforth, I aim to use the following words which are not necessarily synonyms but convey similar sentiments (and compliments): dainty, graceful, elegant, pretty, sweet, lovable. Again, I can express my appreciation by resorting to two word-combinations (not combos, thank you, McDonalds) like ‘ethereally beautiful’, ‘impeccably dressed’, ‘gorgeous jewellery’, ‘breathtaking view’, ‘dazzling smile’ and so on.
I am over the legal age for using the word ‘cool’, (along with its Hawaiian-sounding cousin, ‘kewl’). While it would indeed be ‘kewl’ if my daughter were to borrow my vocabulary, I would not ‘rock’ if I pinched her teenage thesaurus. While ‘awesome’ and its earlier avatar, ‘amazing’ are just right for social networking sites, ‘pathetic’ and ‘sick’ are equally over-used for everything from the galloping crime rate to runaway inflation to growing deforestation. When one buys a dictionary or a thesaurus, one pays for all the words in it, so one might as well take more words out of the metaphorical vocabulary closet and air them ever so often. To describe the aforesaid undesirable situations, one might like to consider one-word options like dreadful, terrible, distressing, horrifying, devastating, menacing, disturbing, dangerous, etc. Two- word options like ‘awfully upsetting’, ‘really tragic’, ‘completely unacceptable’ are even better. I looked for the word ‘awesome’ in a website named ‘Urban Dictionary’.
It said: ‘It is a sticking plaster word that Americans use to cover over the huge gaps in their vocabulary’. Young Indians are much better than their American counterparts but are getting there with their four-adjective tally of awesome, cool, pathetic and amazing – which pretty much sums up the state of everything in the world, good or bad, including themselves. A love for words that are locked away like museum treasures often leads me to a dictionary. I am exhilarated by the serendipity of my discoveries, just as I am frustrated by an idiosyncrasy that prevents me from using the same adjective or adverb twice in a 500 word- article. Long ago, I stumbled upon the word ‘pulchritude’ and was astounded that it meant ‘beauty’. The website I consulted says, “Despite all evidence to the contrary, ‘pulchritudinous’ is used to describe a person of great physical attractiveness. No one is quite sure why, because the word sounds like something unpleasant on the bottom of your shoe. This is possibly due to the fact that it shares sounds with words such as sepulchre, repulsive, cretin, lewd and pus. It’s a good word to use when you’d like someone to think you’re insulting them.” Simply put, a thing of pulchritude is a joy forever.