How To Banish The Laziest Word In The English Langauge —“Thing”
It’s the ball hog on your vocabulary team
Whether you’re a writer of short stories, blogs, or emails, there’s a simple exercise you can do to strengthen your craft.
Revisit an old piece a week or two after publishing. It’s easier to spot flaws when you read your piece without the emotion of impending publication or the pressure of a deadline.
In almost every piece, you’ll find a typo, a confusing sentence, a silly cliché, or some other shame-inducing writing faux pas.
That’s what happened to me this morning. I opened a recent story and nearly cried at my blatant defilement of the English language.
My crime?
I used the word thing, not once but three times.
To use a basketball analogy, think of the word thing as the ball hog on your vocabulary team — the untalented dude who monopolizes the ball but never scores. The use of “thing” infests our communication. Yet, like the ball hog in basketball, it never scores, communicating vagueness and ambiguity instead of clarity and vivid imagery.
It’s a lazy way to express yourself, allowing you to cover all possibilities of meaning instead of drilling down to specificity.
Despite its flaws, the word has utility for a writer. With nearly two dozen official meanings plus slang definitions, it serves as a handy placeholder when you bang out your first draft, but ripe for revision on your next pass.
In almost all cases, it takes only a few minutes of contemplation or perusal of a thesaurus to find a more suitable word or a more creative and descriptive way to express yourself.
Eliminating the laziest word in the English language will force you to write more descriptive sentences and enable you to transform mere words into vivid imagery.
Start with these five suggestions.
To describe an object.
When referencing an object, you do your reader a disservice by using the word thing. It’s too vague for your reader to create a mental picture.
