Le mot juste is a term used a lot when writers lecture or write on the writing process. That, and Nabokov’s “divine detail.” Just this week a quest for the right colloquial word choice for harvesting corn was thrown into the woodpile of the Facebook fire. I was reminded of how many times the writer has to make choices for the exact word usage without sounding herself like a dodo bird.
One person suggested gleaning, but with the qualification that gleaning is a word of historical usage. Clearly, gleaning is a lovely word, but its more specific meaning is to gather leftovers, and in my aging vocabulary also connotes the Ruth and Naomi story, and the old hymn, “Bringing in the Sheaves.”
Go ahead. Look up sheaves.My point is that writers certainly do need to be aware of their vocabulary choices for a given piece. To use the word sheaves for a Facebook audience is about the dumbest thing I could do if I expect anyone to read to the end of this.
In the south in the 50’s we picked cotton, but we pulled corn. If you’ve ever been sent to the garden, or field, to bring back some ears of corn for supper, you could probably guess the correct word for the process as pullingand not picking. It’s not easy to wrestle an ear of corn off its stalk. (Selection of which ears to get and which to leave is the stuff of another essay.)
But how do we know le mot juste when we hear it? Choosing the right word, for me, is much like devising the right ending of a story as prescribed by Hudson Strode, writing professor at the University of Alabama from the early 40’s to the early 60’s , and told to me by Helen Norris Bell.
Strode likened a good ending to a story to be as natural as picking ripe fruit. When picking blueberries from their bush, you will discover that the perfectly ripe ones fall off into your hand with the slightest exertion. Just so, making right choices of words, and endings, will produce results as palatable as the ripest July peach.
