![\"\"](\"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/alactrity.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. \u2019Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”<\/em><\/p>\n What might he have said about the wrong<\/em> word? I’d say that the wrong word is something like a train wreck. It screeches, lights the page on fire, and everything comes to a stop.<\/p>\n Years ago I started a list of words that a good writer would never use. Among them:<\/p>\n alacrity Most of these are show-off words. Bad writers think that such words make them sound smart or something.<\/p>\n I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked up alacrity<\/em> and celerity<\/em>. Useless words just don’t stick in my memory. I finally was able to remember what alacrity<\/em> means because it’s related to an Italian word used in music, allegro<\/em>. As for celerity<\/em>, I finally figured out that it’s related to the word accelerate<\/em>, so that will help me remember that one.<\/p>\n Most of these useless words have Latin or Greek roots, though akimbo<\/em> comes from Old Norse. The proper language of fiction is plain old Anglo-Saxon. That’s one of the many reasons I love Tolkien’s writing so much. He wrote in Anglo-Saxon English, rarely resorted to words borrowed from French, and, as a philologist, he always used the right word. Imagine alacrity<\/em> at Bilbo’s birthday party, or celerity<\/em> in running from orcs.<\/p>\n Thesauruses have a purpose, but mostly, I think, they’re abused. Sometimes, when writing, one knows that there is a lightning word for what one wants to say, but the word refuses to come to mind. A thesaurus can help find it.<\/p>\n It’s pure abuse, though, when someone uses a thesaurus to find an uncommon word with the idea that it’s lazy to use the common word, as though all synonyms are equal. For example, not wanting to describe a shirt as green<\/em>, the word verdant<\/em> is lifted from a thesaurus. A variant of this I call “silly synonyms.” In my years as a newspaper copy editor, I tried to break reporters of it, but I never succeeded. That’s the idea that, having referred to a dog<\/em>, the second reference must be canine<\/em>, or blaze<\/em> after fire<\/em>. How many times have I complained, pencil in my hand, “It’s always dog, dog, dog, damn it.” The words canine<\/em> and blaze<\/em> are two of the best marks of a hack that I can think of.<\/p>\n This is on my mind because, with the help of an AI, I’ve been trying to discover authors that are new to me that I might like. Googling for book lists hasn’t worked well for me. Working with the AI’s suggestions, I’ve downloaded many Kindle samples. I fling most of the samples, because it’s apparent that the writing is poor or that the writer is just cranking stuff out. I recently read Ken Follett’s The Evening and the Morning<\/em> and realized that Follett is a crank-it-out author. I strongly suspect that some of these popular writers have ghost writers who help them crank it out. For example, I suspect that S.J. Parris tried to capitalize on the popularity of C.J. Sansom. But Parris is lazy writer who is just cranking it out.<\/p>\n It seems that the older I get, the harder it is to find fiction that I like. Maybe that’s not surprising. There’s only so much good stuff, and after decades of reading I’ve already read a big chunk of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of my favorite Mark Twain quotes is: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. \u2019Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” What might he have said about the wrong word? I’d say that the wrong word is something like a train wreck. … Continue reading “Words that are never the right word”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31741"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31763,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31741\/revisions\/31763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\ncelerity
\nmyriad
\nplethora
\ncacophony
\nakimbo
\nacrid
\nstentorian
\nerstwhile
\ncomprise
\nstaccato
\npulchritude
\nmellifluous
\nsanguine
\nlugubrious
\nvicissitude
\nrecondite
\neffulgent<\/strong><\/p>\n