🔗 Share this article

As a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes grew hazy. When my exams came around, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus dissolve into endless scrolling on my phone. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for pleasure seems less like nourishment and more like a marathon. 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 restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would research it and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an effort to lodge the word into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and revising it breaks the drift into passive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping aspect to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “mournful” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same overused selection of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the missing component that locks the image into place.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.