In the following description from her novel O My Darling (2005), Amity Gaige uses the words gloriole ("the visual effect of light around the head of a saint") and mote ("a tiny flake of material, such as dust") to describe the effect of light and snow.
Charlotte stepped into the street and looked down the hill at the town. The spires of churches were already frosted white. She could see, even from there, the green glowing face of the clock at the center of town. Above, the sky in the valley had become gray, exactly the color of the naked treetops, which made the earth and the air fuse along the horizon. The streelights had the look of lanterns, each with an orange gloriole that caught the motes of snow. She wished very much that she could stop time in order to see the snow idle in the air.
Why does this precision in language matter? In writing about vocabulary learning in a recent issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, Dictionary of Cultural Literacy author E.D. Hirsch explains that the more precise you are able to be with language, the more space your brain has to think. (We wrote about this here in "'Knowing More Words Makes You Smarter.' (And Richer.)")
The space where we solve our problems is called “working memory.” For everyone, even geniuses, it’s a small space that can hold only a few items in suspension for only a few seconds. If one doesn’t make the right connections within that space, one has to start over again. Hence, one method for coping and problem solving is to reduce the number of items that one has to make sense of at any moment. The psychologist George A. Miller called that process “chunking.” Telephone numbers and Social Security numbers are good examples. The number (212) 374-5278, written in three chunks, is a lot easier to cope with than 2123745278.
Words are fantastically effective chunking devices. Suppose you put a single item into your working memory—say, “Pasteur.” So long as you hold in your long-term memory a lot of associations with that name, you don’t need to dredge them up and try to cram them into your working memory. The name serves as a brief proxy for whatever aspects will turn out to be needed to cope with your problem. The more readily available such proxies are for you, the better you will be at dealing with various problems. Extend this example to whole spheres of knowledge and experience, and you’ll realize that a large vocabulary is a powerful coping device that enhances one’s general cognitive ability.
Amity Gaige is the author of threee novels: Schroder, which was published in 14 languages in February of this year, as well as The Folded World (2007), and O My Darling (2005).