But we all sometimes fall into word habits—like the person who always orders the same thing at his favorite Mexican restaurant, or who will only buy one brand of cookies. It can be a great joy when you break out of the rut. Coming across a new, vibrant, word is one of the most exciting things that can happen to a writer. But where do you find them? Try other languages.
You don’t have to be bilingual or have access to a personal translator to use words from other languages. You can scan foreign-language dictionaries and look at elementary textbooks. Or you can simply pay attention when you come across foreign words in reading or conversation. Take note of them. Pick them up one by one. Save them for a rainy day or a dry spell.
Once you find a word that captures your eye and ear, play with it. Rather than try to incorporate it into your writing with native-speaker precision, mold it, shape, and have fun with it. Words are the writer’s clay. We can form them into whatever fanciful shapes we wish.
Here, for example, are some words I have used in my writing—sometimes exactly as they come out of their original language, sometimes translated into English, and sometimes with my own individual twist.
Heartmind. English has a word for “heart” and a word for “mind,” and they mean two different things. The heart feels; the mind thinks. Hearts are all about laughter and tears; the mind is all about ideas and concepts. But Mandarin Chinese has a single character that means heart and mind, incorporating and going beyond the connotations of both English words. In my writing, I have borrowed not the word itself, but the idea behind it: heartmind.
Saheli. Hindi has a word for “friend.” It also has a separate word for a woman’s woman friend—saheli (sa-hay-lee). The English “girlfriend” doesn’t capture it—the reader can’t be sure you’re talking about romance or friendship. And using “girl” for a grown woman can be irksome. Saheli has none of those problems. And it captures something no English word does—the unique bond of female friendship.
Speechripe. This word, believe it or not, comes from English—but it hasn’t been used for 1,000 years, since the era of Old English. English speakers loved sticking words together back then. One of my favorite of such compounds is speechripe. When you have an idea that you can’t articulate, when something is on your mind but you don’t have the words to talk about it, when a story is forming in your brain but it hasn’t yet turned into a narrative, you have something that isn’t speechripe.
Fireflowers. Before I studied the language myself, someone told me that the Mandarin word for “fireworks” literally translated as “fire flowers.” Actually, it’s more like “flower cannons,” but fireflowers is too lovely an image to discard. When I watch those bright bursts of red and green against the night sky, it seems like the perfect word.