lizvogel

I want a site where I can enter all the words that are almost the one that's been stuck in my brain for days, and have said word appear on the screen now that it's disappeared utterly from my conscious grasp.

I had occasion today to look up the word "syntonics", which apparently has to do with "emotional responsiveness to the environment." Cool.

Now, I'm currently de-bracketing ...And The Kitchen Sink. Which means I'm looking up a lot of words to find a more alliterative or less repetitious way to say something, but I'm also occasionally trying to look up the word for a concept that I know there has to be a word for. And often as not, I'm not having a lot of luck with that latter.

Which is not surprising, because if you Google "emotional responsiveness to the environment" or even "word for emotional responsiveness to the environment", one thing you won't see in your search results in "syntonics". Emotion, yes; emotional responsiveness of certain population groups, yes; even the emotional impact of nice furniture. But not the one word that embodies the concept, which is what as a writer I'm generally looking for.

That is why a thesaurus, while an invaluable tool, is also sometimes frustrating. And that is why the Internet, while a fine thing, is no substitute for knowing stuff.

I have for some time been wishing for a Dreamwidth comm called "there's a word for that", where writers could babble about all the almost-but-not-quite-right words they've thought of and the giant brain of the Internet would tell them the word they actually want.

Turns out there's a theremustbeawordforit tag at linguaphiles. It's mostly used for "What's this word in some other language" questions or specific linguistic terminology, but there are posts trying to find just the right word in English, too. Because the other thing about the giant Internet brain is that whatever you're thinking of, it's already thought of it.