Cheat Code Week Day Five: Thesauruses

South Africa has several official languages, so we have higher expectations of our vocabularies than most. We know there's no way to replicate the musicality of Xhosa in Zulu and no worthy English words to replicate the harshness of Afrikaans. When we translate South African books, we learn how woefully inefficient the English language is. Some words just do the job better, and not all of them are English.

If you're a writer, you must find all the right words. Those words must be visceral. They must knock your readers over with their power. They must sound exactly as they mean. The English language is believed to have about 170,000 words, but it's not enough to find a visceral word. You must also find a word your readers will understand.

You must, in short, develop the power to wield your language well, and you will never, ever achieve that unless you regularly use a thesaurus. I don't care if you use a tree book or a digital tool, as long as you're routinely comparing your available words to find precisely the ones that'll do the job best.

I keep a few of the things. I have the Oxford, but I also have the Yale. They both do things a little differently, and even then, they aren't always adequate. I often have to use online tools as well. MS Word's thesaurus is woefully inefficient, but Power Thesaurus isn't bad. Its definitions aren't as comprehensive as those in an Oxford thesaurus, but if your English skills are reasonable, you might be able to make it work for you.

We are in the business of writing words. Writing without a functional knowledge of those words is a lot like trying to repair a car engine without tools. It's a stupid thing to attempt.

We're not all equally yoked with the same talents and abilities. If you don't have a strong vocabulary, you must develop one. There are no shortcuts. If you're writing and you come across a word that isn't quite right for the job, look it up like we did in the Eighties. Get to know your most important tool. Anything less is frankly absurd.