🔗 Share this article

When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my vision blurred. When my exams came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, revising for hours without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for deep focus fade into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the collection back in an attempt to imprint the word into my memory.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very act of spotting, logging and reviewing it interrupts the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an simple habit to keep up. It is often extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millenarianism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe five percent of these words into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom used.

Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the missing component that snaps the picture into position.

In an era when our gadgets drain our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack scrolling, is at last stirring again.