"Chartjunk” is my new word of the week. It came from Edward Tufte’s excellent book, “Visual Explanations,” in which he described how to arrange visual information for clearer communication, using examples like the Challenger Shuttle debacle that occurred when the rocket booster engineers failed to clearly convey to NASA administrators the extreme likelihood that plastic o-rings lose their resiliency at low temperatures, as on the below freezing day of the ill-fated launch. The engineers presented a slew of charts the day before that were cluttered and confusing, i.e. filled with chartjunk that distracted from their main point.
Tufte’s heavily-illustrated books on visual communications are fascinating, well-organized and convincing, as you’d expect considering the topic. “Chartjunk,” Tufte said, “indicates statistical stupidity, just as weak writing often reflects weak thought: ‘Neither can his mind be thought to be in tune whose words do jarred,’ wrote Ben Jonson in the early 1600s, ‘nor his reason in frame whose sentence is preposterous.’”
So how to boost your vocabulary and avoid Jonson’s wrath without sitting down and reading a dictionary? The very best approach, read a lot, is included in a WikiHow article, “How to Understand Words Without Using a Dictionary” which suggests three methods often cited by experts. Use context; reread the entire sentence and look for illustrative examples or restatements by the author. The second method, “Understanding Basic Etymology,” requires recognizing common prefixes (“intro,” “hyper,” etc.) and suffixes. For example, suffixes such as “-ee” and “-ity” at the end of a word usually means it’s a noun, as in “employee,” whereas “-ate” and “-ise” indicate verbs, like “create” and “exercise”).
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Growing vocabularies naturally requires pushing yourself to read challenging materials. The nonprofit Lapham’s Quarterly is my all-time favorite magazine and always a thoughtful, challenging and even fun, read and since each issue is timeless, a subscription makes a wonder-filled, lasting gift. Plus, it always includes a Lapham’s Glossary of unusual words related to that issue’s focus. The current issue, “Rivalry and Feud,” includes “brabble” (“to quarrel about trifles”), “tomato can” (“An inferior or second-rate fighter”), and “dumbcow” (“From Hindi Dam khana, to eat one’s breath, to be silent”).
Effective communicators know to avoid trite, uninspiring terminology, such as “fine,” “good,” and their current counterparts “cool” and “awesome,” all overused to the point of meaninglessness. Coming to the rescue is DailyWritingTips.com’s “41 Words That Are Better Than Good.” Instead of responding “fine,” when asked how you’re doing, consider replying “choice,” “exquisite, “rare,” or even “up to snuff.” “Up to snuff,” meaning “doing pretty well,” dates back to the early 1800s when sniffing snuff was an expensive extravagance beyond the quid-chewing, pipe-smoking lower classes.
Vocabulary builders often enjoy learning the unusual origins of some terms since knowing how words change dramatically over time is prudent. “Naughty,” for example, once meant “needy, having nothing,” “nice” meant “silly, foolish, simple,” while “silly” came from the Old English gesælig “happy, fortuitous, prosperous.”
With our tongue’s hyperflexibility, if necessary, new words can be coined and perhaps catch on. The Washington Post contributes to this effort with their annual “Style Invitational” in which readers are asked “to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.”
Perhaps it reflects the national mood, but many winning submissions were rather grim, like “dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly,” and “bozone: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.” Fortunately, your public library, the premier place for improving vocabularies, is bozone-free and immune to the dopeler effect.