963 Words - by Ben Steinhorn - Befriendjamin

I began keeping lists of words in college. A professor emeritus of history shamed a student in our class for not looking up the definition of a word in a previously assigned reading. If you don’t know a word, look it up, he admonished. Don’t come to class not knowing the definition of a word used seventeen times in the assigned reading. I didn’t love the way he did it, but I never forgot the lesson, or the word. Ecumenical. And it wasn’t so bad to look up a word every now and then. Though it was the generalization of the lesson that proved far more useful: to always look up a concept or reference I didn’t understand. I say all this because Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun almost broke me. I wrote down every word I didn’t know in a small notebook while reading his Tetralogy. There are so fucking many of them. It seriously disrupted my reading. But I know now it was a good thing. Writing down each unknown word slowed me down and made me pay attention to word choice. By the time I began r

I began keeping lists of words in college. A professor emeritus of history shamed a student in our class for not looking up the definition of a word in a previously assigned reading. If you don’t know a word, look it up, he admonished. Don’t come to class not knowing the definition of a word used seventeen times in the assigned reading. I didn’t love the way he did it, but I never forgot the lesson, or the word. Ecumenical. And it wasn’t so bad to look up a word every now and then. Though it was the generalization of the lesson that proved far more useful: to always look up a concept or refere