Take It Off -- A Word List Challenge
It was, I believe, Coco Chanel who said that after a woman is fully dressed, accessories and all, she should take one thing off. Only then she will be ready to leave the house. Believe it or not, this is very hard for true fashionistas to do.
Not being a fashionista myself, I haven’t really been able to take Chanel’s advice. (I hardly ever accessorize, so if I took one thing off before walking out the front door, I’d be an affront to public decency.) But the idea that even a seemingly perfect ensemble can and should be edited has fascinated me for years. And now I think I’ve found a way to use it in my life.
My new rule is: No vocabulary list is complete until you take (at least) one word off.
It seems contradictory, but it could also be super efficient. We don’t need all the words we think we need.
I mean, did I really need the word “der Bekennerbrief” -- which took me nearly two months to commit to long-term memory? (There is no direct translation into English, but a “Bekennerbrief” is a letter you send to the police in order to claim responsibility for a crime.) Or how about “das Gelage,” which is a binge or a bender, but not the word used to construct the translations of “drinking binge,” “shopping binge,” or even “cleaning binge”? I don’t even go on benders in real life!
Anyway, the next time “das Gelage” comes around, I'm deleting it from my Goldlist, no matter how much it hurts. What I really should have done, though, was edit “das Gelage” from the list of candidates, so that it never had a chance to be a problem. That would have hurt less.
And now I’m going to edit something in real time. Earlier today, I mined the following words:
Verbs:
abrichten -- to train
anstreben -- to strive for
verhätscheln -- to coddle
wischen -- to wipe
Adjectives:
beschissen -- crappy
folgsam -- obedient
furchterregend -- frightening
kribblig -- tingly
schutzlos -- defenseless
tugendhaft -- virtuous
verflucht -- cursed
Nouns:
der Hubschrauber -- the helicopter
der Hummer -- the lobster
der Kofferraum -- the boot of a car
der Kram -- odds and ends (stuff)
der Überblick -- the overview
die Verhandlung -- the negotiation/trial
die Vorkehrung -- the precautionary measure
das Gewürz -- the spice
das Magengeschür -- the stomach ulcer
das Werkzeug -- the instrument
Expressions:
aufs falsche Pferd setzen -- to bet on the wrong horse
Katze im Sack kaufen -- to buy a pig in a poke
mit Kopf und Verstand -- with mind and intellect
ins Visier nehmen -- to target
auf die Spur kommen -- to get on track
raus aus den Federn -- rise and shine
gegen eine Wand reden -- to talk to a wall
And this will be a dramatic culling. My Goldlist rule is twenty new words or expressions per day; above are twenty-eight. So which eight are going to go for now?
The nouns are going to take the biggest hit. I don’t foresee getting a stomach ulcer from eating lobster in a helicopter in either the near or the distant future. But these are also easy deletions. This exercise requires a little more ruthlessness.
And what’s really going to hurt is not the loss of four nouns I don’t really need (yet), but the loss of one verb, one adjective, and one expression. I still want them all -- but ”verhältschen,” “kribblig,” and “raus aus den Federn“ will either have to enter my long-term memory right now . . . or wait until I come across them again.
