🔗 Share this article

When I was a child, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. When my exams came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve watched that capacity for intense focus fade into endless browsing on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it interrupts the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple routine to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, pull out my device and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but rarely handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself reaching less frequently for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is at last waking up again.