Guest Post: Wordlily

The first of many guest posts from my fellow bloggers. This one is from Hannah Nielsen, whose website, wordlily.wordpress.com is a true home for a bibliophile. It also happens to feature a review of A Disobedient Girl today.

Addendum: Just came across this website on words: http://savethewords.org/

I’m honored to be offered this platform for today.

On my blog I have a regular weekly feature — Words from my reading — in which I post the words I’ve recently read, in books, that I was previously unfamiliar with. I include the word, the definition, and the sentence from the book that contains the word.

Here, instead of explaining all the different aspects of each entry, I’ll just give an example:

coir, n The prepared fiber of the husks of coconuts, used to make matting and rope
page 11, A Disobedient Girl by Ru Freeman
“Then she climbed on a low bench and took her blue dress off the coir rope where she had hung it to air after the last time.”

I started doing this earlier this year because I realized that my vocabulary had most likely shrunk from its laudable size in my school years. I’ve always liked learning new words, but since I’m not taking classes and certainly not turning in vocab lists every week for a grade, I found myself realizing I was not even retaining my vocabulary, let alone burgeoning it.

So I slowly acknowledged that to slow this ebb, I needed to act. I get a steady influx of words — I read a lot. What the situation required was a way of capturing those unfamiliar words.

We know that multiple encounters with information makes the likelihood of retention rise. So, I thought, what better way than to blog about these words? This means I’m not only reading the word, but I’m also:
2. writing the word down, along with the page number and part of speech,
3. typing the word,
4. typing the quote,
5. looking up the word, and
6. typing the definition.

This is a definite increase in the number of times I’m engaging with each new (to me) word, so hopefully I’ll learn what they all mean and even remember them the next time I read them.

I also figured that by posting these words on my blog I may boost the vocabulary of my readers. Nothing wrong with that, eh?

A (somewhat) unexpected and unintended side effect: Sometimes there’s a peer pressure element. I’ve made a commitment to post all the words I don’t know, even if I think a word is probably one many people know, or if it’s one I used to know but couldn’t remember when I read it. This has taken some courage, but I’ve stuck with it.

As I’ve continued to collect and post new words, I needed a way to put them all in one place, so I’ve created my Words page. It contains all the words from my words posts, along with their definitions. And instead of being in order of the book I read them in, they’re in alphabetical order. Fitting, yes?

Lastly, I’d like you to join me in wishing Ru Freeman a very happy birthday — using whatever words you desire — in the comments. Happy birthday, Ru! I hope it’s grand.