🔗 Share this article

As a youngster, I devoured books until my eyes blurred. When my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a ascetic, revising for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for intense focus fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small habit has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial attention.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less frequently for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.