As a child I devoured books until my eyes blurred. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into infinite scrolling on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the touch of a finger. Reading for pleasure feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.
So, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my memory.
The list now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – 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 word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into passive, semi-skimmed attention.
There is also a journalling element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.
Not that it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.
Realistically, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but rarely handled.
Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the exact word you were searching for – like finding the missing puzzle piece that locks the picture into place.
In an era when our devices siphon off our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is finally waking up again.
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