Natural Path

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Amanda calling from Lafarge, Wisconsin.

Amanda?

Yes.

How are you?

I’m well. How are you guys doing?

Doing quite well. What’s up?

I have two questions, and the first one is I’ve been looking for a word that I once heard, and I don’t know if I’d be able to recognize it if I heard it. But the meaning of it is a social path that gets created. It’s a noun, and it’s a walking path that gets created from people, say, walking across the lawn on a college campus. Not an actual paved path, but because it’s the best, most natural path from point A to point B.

Oh, wow.

I do know the word for that.

You do know the word for it.

I do.

What is it?

I’m waiting with bated breath because I’ve been looking for it for years.

Oh, me too.

In urban planning, they call that a desire path.

A desire path.

If you look it up, it’s in urban planning books, right and left, up and down. It’s the most standard term that I know of for that because people walk where they desire.

Right.

Well, and my second question is about this, and I thought it was another word. I thought it was a single word, but I could just be remembering it wrong. Is that if you have a word that you’re looking for, how do you find a really sophisticated thesaurus to find such a word? And I don’t know if desire path was what I was thinking or what I remember, but it could have been so long that I just don’t remember anymore. What’s the best way to look up a unique word?

Well, in this particular case, I don’t think a thesaurus is the tool that you want. And actually, I usually, and this is going to surprise a lot of people, I actively try to dissuade people from using them.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

Well, because people, and I know this from the work that I’ve done as a lexicographer, somebody who, you know, I’ve worked on a thesaurus before, and I’ve worked on many dictionaries. I’ve seen the studies that show how people use thesauruses, and they tend to use them incorrectly. What they tend to do is use them as a way to come up with a word to substitute for another word. But the problem is they’ll grab any old word out of the thesaurus entry without really knowing what it means and just slot it into their sentence, and they tend to use words incorrectly when they do that. They tend to have certainly sixth graders on up through almost all the way through college. That’s the big age where people are using these words. And they come with these extraordinarily inappropriate phrases.

I guess the classic example, Martha, did you tell me this the other day of the kid who looked up, he said, my family erodes every night.

Erode.

Erode, yeah, E-R-O-D-E. He looked up the word eat and he found the eat away had a synonym of erode. My family eats out every night is what he meant to say, but he thought he was talking fancy, so he used the word erode. And that’s kind of an extreme case, but people do that all the time, especially when they’re learning a foreign language.

Yeah, that could be a real danger, right?

It’s even more so, but people do it in English, too. So what I would persuade you to do is to go online. There are a number of different places where you can find this, but the one that I use is onelook.com has a reverse dictionary.

Yep.

And so you’ll find the link for it at the bottom of the page. I’m not associated with them in any way. I just like what they do there. And you type in the concept, you know, kind of keep it brief, and they’ll come up with a bunch of entries that might be related to the concept that you typed in. And it works pretty well.

Huh.

Well, that’s great. I’m looking forward to using the reverse dictionary from now on.

Thanks so much.

I appreciate it.

Okay.

Thanks for calling me.

Thanks for coming to Serena, Amanda.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, Grant, we should point out, too, the origin of the word thesaurus, which I just love. In Latin, thesaurus means treasury.

Oh, I thought it was related to the verb for beat about the head and neck with a book.

It’s not? No.

No, no. Treasury, so it’s like a treasury of language.

Yeah, isn’t it gorgeous?

It is nice.

Yeah.

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