Diction – Pickiness is Desired

Diction is being picky about words. Picky, picky, picky — my mother’s lament when I whined about my meal. I wanted borders on my plate. I cringed at green beans crossing over mashed potatoes or meatloaf touching corn. “It all goes to the same place,” she’d say. Still, I persisted in moving food apart. Why? Taste matters. Our writing all goes to the same place, too: to a reader’s mind. But we don’t just heap word upon word like mashed potatoes on spaghetti. We make clear distinctions, consider innuendos, seek the best possible word to convey our intention. This is integral to what we do, so we must be picky. That’s not a criticism; that’s a compliment.

Three jobs of diction

Merriam-Webster tells us diction is the “choice of words especially with regard to correctness, clearness, or effectiveness.” That’s a three-part job! We dig into diction to search for the correct, the clearest, and most effective word to make our writing shine. That takes time and reflection, research and study, but that effort is worth it to produce work well done. When we need some help, where can we go? To where diction lives, of course.

Peruse the diction-ary

I felt a little silly about looking up dictionary in a dictionary … but who cares? Merriam-Webster tells us dictionary is “a reference source in print or electronic form containing words usually alphabetically arranged along with information about their forms, pronunciations, functions, etymologies, meanings, and syntactic and idiomatic uses.” By the way, when I discover a word’s etymology, I feel as if I get to know that word’s personal story and grow to love it more.

Dictionaries are word gold mines—as are their cousins, Thesauruses. Both are a writer’s treasure trove of word options. If you’re lucky to have access to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)—you must pay to subscribe, or use a library that does—you’ll find some super-duper word stories about the first use of any, and I mean any, given word in the English language. That search can reveal more ideas and other interesting words you might use. For a fun break from writing, check out the OED website. Or any dictionary. Spend an hour dedicated to diction-gone-wild. P. S. Our book club is reading The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester, an utterly remarkable story of the making of that paragon of lexical aides.

Diction in action

Here’s a favorite sentence from Anne Lamott’s wonderful book, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Notice a word I find that’s sort of picky: buoyancy.

“I don’t mind if a person has no hope if he or she is sufficiently funny about the whole thing, but then, this being able to be funny definitely speaks of a kind of hope, of buoyancy.”

Buoyancy even sounds like what it means. Merriam-Webster: “1a: the tendency of a body to float or to rise when submerged in a fluid testing an object’s buoyancy b chemistry: the power of a fluid to exert an upward force on a body placed in it. also: the upward force exerted 2: the ability to recover quickly from depression or discouragement: RESILIENCE.”

Think of someone pushing a beach ball under water in a swimming pool, but the beach ball will not stay down. It pops up over and over. Like hope. Hope doesn’t let a person stay down. What if Anne Lamott had chosen that synonym, resilience? Wouldn’t the sound affect you differently? Doesn’t it convey a different image or feeling than buoyancy? I think Lamott chose the prefect word here, one that connects us to feelings and ideas that support the idea of funniness: lightness, bubbles, movement, such as a child at grandma’s house bouncing on the bed, happy and free. Granted, diction is subjective and depends on a writer’s taste, but in my view, Lamott’s picky word buoyancy is perfect for this sentence. It is correct, clear, and effective! Let’s all be picky, picky, picky like that!