How often do we hear that we need a better vocabulary? How often are you reminded that your SSAT's and MCAS tests will kill you with their vocabulary sections? How much do you really care?

Learning vocabulary simply to pass a test or impress the snob next door misses the whole point and beauty of language. Language is the gift--as well as the tool--that allows and enables us to both appreciate, understand and express the complexity and nuance of our inner and outer lives.

A short, and hopefully pertinent, digression: I worked for a number of years building stone walls for John Bordman--a brilliant and ornery Yankee curmudgeon if there ever was one--in the hopes that I could learn everything I needed to learn about this piling on of stones. From early on in my apprenticeship, he would leave me at a site for hours on end to pick through a mountain of stone trying to find the stones that would "fit together" to make the wall. Invariably, when he returned, he would calmly and quietly destroy ninety percent of my day's work. As critical as he was of society, he rarely crushed my fragile ego by criticizing my efforts; Instead, he would say things like, "Damn hard to find good stones in this pile!" While in the same breath he would add, "But, it's all we have to work with." He would then proceed to craft a magnificent wall--a wall that will last for centuries--walls built out of the material at hand, walls that only a true connoisseur of stone walls could appreciate.

It didn't take long to figure that building stone walls would take its toll on both the body and the fingers of a fledgling folksinger. But in my world of metaphor I carry those same stones with me as I struggle to build a song, a poem, a story...or this. Words are the stones we work with; the more stones in our pile, the more we can build the wall of our dreams. But, equally important is the reality that a pile of good stone does not make a wall, as a thousand new vocabulary words won't make you a better writer. John Bordman never went out and bought more stone just to have more to choose from; instead he always brought good stone in the first place: stone from walls that edge the fields (and what once was fields) all over New England--hand-picked stones culled from the wisdom of his experience. Big, solid, interesting stones already weathered by the storms and vicissitudes of time.

It's not so much that you need a lot of obscure words as much as you need good words. And you need to recognize good words. And to do that you need the experience of words used well: words used in elevated writing; words used in great speeches; words you hear and read and feel; words that you see working. A truly extensive and effective vocabulary is built on an "attentiveness to precise language." It means you have to embrace the world of words used well; It means turning off senseless TV. It means measuring a book by the possibilities it presents, not by its rank on the best seller lists; It means discussions informed by wisdom and decorum--not polemics. It means entering your writer's space with an open and disciplined mind. It means learning the craft, and recognizing the art, of writing.

It is simply another chance to get better at what you do.

Say what you mean, and mean what you say.

And try like hell to say it well.