I saw a friend of mine last night, a writer whose work and taste and general vibe I respect and admire a great deal. I asked her if she had heard the word submersible before last week and she said she was fairly sure she had not. She uses language precisely so I would expect her to have heard it before if it was in even vaguely common usage. I felt sure I had not, and the fact that she also thought she had not made me think the same was likely true for most people. By most people I mean people who don’t work in a field or have a hobby which relates to submersibles.
I have a pretty good vocabulary. This is partly because when I worked as a risk analyst for an insurance company for a little while I used to pass a lot of my time looking on an online thesaurus at different possible substitutions for words and then reading the definition of each meaning. That was a job where I was always being asked to duplicate work and so on, or being set tasks which were clearly designed only to keep me occupied and had no other purpose. I have written about this a little here.
My manager at that job once asked me to count the rows on a table and I highlighted the row and said: ‘Oh it’s 4326’ or whatever it was, and then he printed the table out, using a great sheaf of paper, and brought it over to me and asked me to do it by hand. That actually happened. And, like many office jobs, there was a rule whereby even if I did not have enough work to do I had to appear to be working, so I couldn’t read magazine articles online at my desk in an obvious way or anything like that.
And so I had little games to fill up the working hours. I would copy paragraphs out of magazine articles and paste them into a spreadsheet which I had designed to look work-ish so I could read them. And then I had the thesaurus game. The thesaurus game was great in that it would always generate new research. And it always just looked like I was on google, looking something work related up. Often I would look up a word and know almost all of the synonyms and their meanings pretty accurately, but there would be one which I only vaguely knew, or which I had vaguely thought meant something slightly different.
For example, imperious is a synonym for supercilious. And I remember when I was looking this up I had probably mashed together the meaning for impervious with the one for imperious so I had a vague sense that imperious meant a kind of haughty impenetrability and actually it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean arrogant and domineering, and at the same time cold or distant. It just means arrogant and domineering. Which is maybe not the biggest difference, but it would substantially change how and when you used it.
Also there are some words which I would think should have a different meaning to the one they do, because of the way they sound. For example, I should be able to use the word bombastic to describe that type of writing where the writer is trying very hard to be funny and jocular but in a tone which would make no right minded person laugh. Instead it has a sort of screeching quality. It’s a very British register, I don’t see it much from Americans. But it will say, like: “Well, quelle surprise!” or “colour me surprised!” or “I was sleeping in a mouldy flat in zone 4 and I could barely afford a sandwich” or similar. It’s the opposite of dry humour. Actually I think it’s kind of the opposite of humour.
But bombastic doesn’t mean that. It means more like the way someone like Boris Johnson writes, where it’s all long or grand sounding words mashed together in such a way as to thinly disguise the underlying lack of substance. Bombastic is basically ‘stupid person’s definition of a smart person’ writing. But I think the way the word ‘bombastic’ sounds describes that other screeching tone so well I will probably always be disappointed I can’t actually use it in that context.
Anyway, this is to say the thesaurus game was a very productive use of my time. And that, I think because of it, when I hear a word I don’t think I have come across before it strikes me. So I was interested in the way that everyone suddenly started using the word submersible instead of submarine last week, and I have some thoughts on that. And I will come back to those next week. (The first ‘to be continued’ of Who knows?...)
Till next time xxxx
Some of you clocked my Sharon Tate mistake last week, thank you!! And apologies for any confusion :).
I am doing a “salon” with Celeste Marcus from Liberties in July if you want to join us, I think it will be fun. Here is a code for free tickets: Libertellect. I have an essay out with them soon which I’m excited about.
And pre-order links for Lazy City are here.
Some things I liked recently:
I thought this piece on penis enlargement surgery was really great and well done. I was quite interested that a couple of people in the piece (not the journalist) compared penis enlargement surgery to breast enhancement surgery. It’s medically different for sure, but also culturally too I think. Being a woman with small breasts is actually not so big a deal I don’t think. There’s a cultural narrative around breasts in which smaller can be a positive thing, like it’s a more ‘fashion-y’ look, even. But there is only one narrative around penis size. Anyway I thought this bit was really sad:
What surgeons continually emphasized—the implanters with pride, the explanters with dismay—was that most of the men they were seeing had been of at least average size before going under the knife. (The photographic evidence men sent to me over text and e-mail supported this contention.)
This profile of Lorrie Moore I thought was great and very funny:
This habit seems like an example of her social graces — she is unfailingly well mannered — but it is also a clever trick that defuses the interviewer’s tactic of letting silences linger, to encourage the subject to fill them with revelations. It’s a tactic that works especially well on men, of course, already so eager to talk about themselves to nice women.
Flowers!!!