Vocabulary
Expand your vocabulary so you can describe the subtle aspects of your experiences or ideas.
experience is a rich combination of sensory input, like your Sense of Sight and your Sense of Hearing, in combination with how you understand the world and how you feel about it—Now I Feel. Our main way of communicating these experiences is through language, and more specifically, words.
Poetry shows us that a few words can evoke volumes of information within us, but if we don’t associate the richness of our experience with an equally rich collection of words, the words we do have lose their power to move us.
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In school, we’re given vocabulary lists and are expected to learn new words by rote. You can do that, but I’m not sure how well you’ll be able to integrate them into your thinking. Learning a new word every day is a good practice, especially if you practice using the word throughout the day.
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People invent words in an effort to describe their experience. The vast number of words in the English language reflect millennia of people experiencing the world and trying to capture it in words. By expanding your vocabulary, you expand your capacity to experience reality.
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Ideally, you will learn new words in the same way they were created, in a moment then you need to express an experience. Otherwise, they’re just words. When I was younger, I wasn’t very emotionally intelligent. I was aware of a couple of emotions: anger and sadness. For a long time, I didn’t have the words to describe what I felt, and that inability to name my emotions limited me. I knew words like “joy” and “jealousy,” but I couldn’t easily pin them to my own experience. It takes an effort to express how you’re feeling to make the connections you need. Inquiry is a great practice to expand this, but you may need to learn some new words after the fact; look back at how you felt and explore synonyms looking for the perfect word.
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According to cognitive science, words are the labels to frames.
Therefore:
Expand your vocabulary so you have the words at hand to describe the subtle aspects of your experiences or ideas.
To connect words to emotions and feelings, practice Inquiry