Consider the thesaurus
The thesaurus sucks. It's flat. Everything connects to everything (the original sin), and it treats every synonym as equal (they're not!).
Consider the thesaurus
The thesaurus sucks. You can always tell when a writer is using a thesaurus and random words are substituted to sound smart. The problem is the thesaurus has a bad architecture. It's flat. Everything connects to everything (the original sin), and it treats every synonym as equal (they're not!). Since we don't have a hierarchy of "core words" and
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The better your vocabulary, the more things you can name, the richer your base of raw materials to hang new ideas and experiences on.
Neil Kakkar • Vocabulary as a Meta Mental Model
Dean’s Thesaurus: 1,000 words to save us from extinction (logo: dinosaur)
Imagine a “situational thesaurus.” Instead of just unpacking related words, you unpack all the contexts that a word can apply. Examples:
addle — social media, work, disinformation (dilution from quantity)
faustian — VR / AGI or e/acc, finance, cloning, influencers, adderall, steroids
platonic — solids, relationships, education, leisure, cognition
Dictionary dump (unformatted): a/an : “A was modified from the Egyptian hieroglyph representing the eagle. In Hebrew it was an ox, and in Greek it was a “symbol of a bad AUGURY in the sacrifices.” The distinction between a/an happened around the 1300s. aardvark : South African “earth pig” aaron’s serpent : “something so powerful as to swallow up
... See moreThis is the best vocabulary test I found (of the three I tried):
https://preply.com/en/learn/english/test-your-vocab
What to expect: first, they give you a grid of 50 words, ranging from really easy to really hard. I knew probably 90% of these. But then based on what you select, it gives you a second group of words that’s at the edge of your zone,
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