Weekly Inspiration: “Le mot juste”

As writers, we are all in danger or in hopes of becoming wordsmiths—the writer who seeks and finds le mot juste, the best, right word. The great French novelist Gustave Flaubert is said to have invented the phrase to describe his endless search for the right word, sometimes spending a day working on a single page of Madame Bovary. Mœurs de province.

Whether we aspire to that level of perfection we can hone our wordsmithing skills in a lot of ways. I subscribe to the Merriam-Webster Word of the Day service and challenge myself to define the word before I check their definition. Sometimes I’m spot on, and sometimes I’m off base. I recommend reading definitions in all their detail. Again Meriam-Webster offers the most detail online definitions, with etymologies, first date of use, and variants. And hog heaven for a logophile is simply to sit down with the authoritative OED (Oxford Dictionary of English) and devour a few definitions.

 A serious logophile loves old words and new—whether archaic and long abandoned, the most up-to-date slang, even gobbledygook. Words that are emerging to describe our changing world are especially interesting, even creative. The last few decades of computer advances have produced an avalanche of new words and terms to describe new technologies—just think of Twitter with its tweets that you make to your peeps, or of unfriending someone because they’d become a troll on your Facebook page.

 A recent article “How the Coronavirus Has Infected Our Vocabulary” by Karen Russell appears in The New Yorker magazine. It’s not as grim as you might expect, as she explores the language of the pandemic that most of us are now newly encountering. In addition, her own writing is an excellent example of beautifully chosen words. I hope it will inspire you to write a quick poem or paragraph—or go back to something you’ve already written—with a view to finding the best word—verb, noun, adjective—for your writing!

I confess, I wish she’d included the term “sheltering in place” which I find evocative, even haunting. My first thought was that it had a military origin, but it come from civilian quarters and is a warning to stay at home rather than to evacuate in the event of a biological threat or a shooter. I couldn’t find an earliest date of use, but 2003 is the earliest date given in footnotes. Wikipedia discusses the term here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelter_in_place.

I trust you will find Russell’s essay as enlightening as I do! Happy writing.

Judith Stanton