The French novelist Gustave Flaubert believed that only one word could give justice to a particular thing—
“le mot juste” —and he obsessively searched for it before committing himself on paper. He may well have been right. After all, short of deliberately destroying the thing itself, there really isn’t much we can do to change its fundamental nature. Thus, in the English language, an “apple” will remain an “apple” till it’s eaten and digested, and “Eve” will remain “Eve” even after she has eaten that apple and is cast away from Paradise. Fortunately for us, however, there’s really no semantic law forbidding us to call an “apple” or “Eve” by some other word the next time it figures in our thoughts or on our tongues.
IMAGE CREDIT: RAWPIXEL.COM How dreary language, communication, and literature would be, in fact, if Flaubert’s prescription for words—like what is generally believed as the preferred French prescription for kissing—were to be followed to the letter! Then we would have to contend every time with the tedium of going through passages like this:
“The
apple is the popular edible fruit of the apple tree. The
apple has the scientific name
Malus sylvestris and belongs to the family
Rosaceae. The
apple is widely cultivated in temperate climates. The
apple has more than 7,000 varieties but only 40 are commercially important, and the most popular
apple variety in the U.S. is called ‘Delicious.’
Apples are of three main types: cooking
apples, dessert
apples, and
apples for making cider.”
Using synonyms or similar words in place of a particular key word is actually one of the most powerful devices for giving zest and substance to language. Along with the other reference word techniques that we have already learned, they help ensure that our listeners or readers won’t tune us out because of boredom. Synonyms, while not exactly
le mot juste, allow us to clarify meaning by focusing on the word’s specific attributes, thus throwing new light on the same idea. They make laborious, complicated explanations unnecessary; as in painting, well-chosen single words or short phrases are quick brush strokes that illumine ideas or clarify meaning and intent. As Peter Mark Roget, author of
Roget’s Thesaurus, remarked in his introduction to the revolutionary book in 1852: “Some felicitous expression thus introduced will frequently open the mind of the reader to a whole vista of collateral ideas.”
Indeed, see what happens to the dreary apple passage above when we take Roget’s prescription to heart:
“The apple, the mythical fruit often associated with the beginnings of the world and mankind, is
the popular fruit of the tree of the same name. The fleshy, edible
pome—usually of red, yellow, or green color—has the scientific name
Malus sylvestris and belongs to the family
Rosaceae. As
a cousin of the garden rose, it has the same usually prickly shrub with feather-shaped leaves and five-petaled flowers. It is widely cultivated as
a fruit crop in temperate climates. More than 7,000 varieties of the
species are known but only 40 are commercially important, and its most popular variety in the U.S. is called ‘Delicious.’ The fruit is of three main types: the cooking apple, the dessert apple, and the type for making cider.”
This revised passage uses a total of eight apple synonyms and similar words: “popular fruit,” “tree of the same name,” “pome,” “a cousin of the garden rose,” “a fruit crop,” “species,” “variety,” and “the type”—each one capturing a new shade of meaning, aspect, connotation, or denotation of the apple and throwing the idea of the word “apple” in bolder relief.
We must beware, though, that synonyms can only establish contexts, not definitions; they may help illuminate discourse but not offer an analysis of things. For instance, in the revised apple passage, the synonyms used will be useful only to the extent that each of them is already understood by the listeners or readers. All of the apple-related words used—except “pome”—work very well as synonyms in the passage because they are of common knowledge; depending on the target audience, however, “pome” may need some clarifying amplification. (A pome, for those confounded by the word, is “a fleshy fruit with an outer thickened fleshy layer and a central core with usually five seeds enclosed in a capsule.”) The speaker or writer must ultimately decide if such amplification is needed.
When using synonyms, we also must make sure that their antecedent words—whether nouns, pronouns, or verbs—are clear all throughout. There is always the danger of overdoing the word replacements, particularly when the conceptual link between the original sword and the synonym is not strong enough. In that case, repeating the original word or using the obvious pronoun for it—“he,” “she,” “it,” “they,” or “them”—may be more advisable. Go over the revised apple passage again and see how the pronoun “it” for apple was used twice to provide such a link and continuity.
This essay, which first appeared in my weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times
, subsequently became Chapter 58 of my book Giving Your English the Winning Edge
, ©2009 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.Read this essay and listen to its voice recording in The Manila Times
:Using synonyms to enliven proseNext week:
Using relative pronouns as reference words (November 14, 2024)
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and X (Twitter) and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.