Powerful Diction

I often come across words that I know, but rarely use. These words are sophisticated and show off a bit of erudite by the user, and I often jot them down in the hopes of remembering the word. This has proven really ineffective, as my choice of paper for notation is usually my classroom notes. I write it once during a lecture and forget about it thereafter, only to recognize it in the corse of studying at a later date. After the course is over, I rarely go back to the notes, so the words fall back into a state of disuse.

To solve this problem, I want to code a simple PHP/MySQL solution that will allow me to quickly enter new words, search for words, and automatically pull the definitions upon displaying said words. I could include a script to randomly pull a word from the database and display it along with a short definition on my home page. (The wheels in my brain commence turning.) This really should require minimal effort, so conceivably, I should be able to turn around the idea quickly.

I think this would be cool, as I love words that have nuanced meanings. Few people (in the whole spectrum of educated persons), in my opinion, really discern the minute differences between synonyms—words that have a small amount of contextual meaning or usage. I cannot think of an example at the moment, but I trust you get the drift of my argument.

Mass media, television, and the Internet present a great deal of information and entertainment, but the value of words in books and literature has fallen dramatically in recent years, it would seem. So few young people (especially in their teens and twenties) seem to read for pleasure, instead opting to occupy their time with other forms of less stimulating entertainment (although probably not by their standards). There was an interesting news story somewhere about this phenomenon (related more to dropping vocabulary sizes) that reported a statistic that teenagers today have about half the average vocabulary size of teenagers ten years ago. Whoa! If alarms are not going off in your head, then perhaps you should re-read that last sentence. Clearly, there is a problem here.

Personally, I enjoy reading and wish I had more time to devote to it. In the meantime, though, I plan to try and remember interesting words that I happen upon with a bit of computerized help.