When I think of home, I think of frogs.
Specifically, I think of the Japanese word kaeru, which, as a verb means to return home safely1, but, as a noun, means frog.
Because of this, Japanese homes2 and gardens often feature a small statue of a frog - often a mother frog with her children riding on her back - placed somewhere unobtrusive as a talisman or maybe just as a good luck charm3.
But here's the thing: I found a book at the library the other day4 that illustrated, through beautiful watercolors, pairs of animals that are often mistaken for one another: crow and raven, turtle and tortoise, frog and toad. And the statue of a frog I have out in my garden looks a whole lot like the toad in the book.
In general, Japanese people don't really distinguish between the two. While the words exist, they're not really everyday vocabulary. If anything, toads are seen as a subset of frog by everyone who's not a biologist.
So, is it important that, at least where this one aspect of Japanese culture is concerned, frog and toad are synonyms?
Not really5.
Over the past three issues, we’ve talked about what makes a synonym, examined house and home as our prime example, and talked about the potential for a.i. to change how we teach vocabulary with relation to synonymy. What we haven't really talked about is why it matters.
In my day job, I teach English as a Foreign Language. Most of my students will, at some point, need to take a standardized test to prove that they speak English well enough to enter university or to get a job. Having a large vocabulary is a huge part of being able to do well on these tests. In fact, there are sections of some tests dedicated to questions that ask, specifically, which of a range of words best match the meaning of another word, i.e., which words are most synonymous with the target word.
Of course, this makes the study of vocabulary in general and synonyms in particular an important facet of studying English, and by extension, any other second language. But maybe that doesn't apply to me and you. After all, we already speak English well enough to both write and read this newsletter. Why is synonymy an important enough topic that I'm spending four issues addressing it?
To put it bluntly: complexity matters.
Over the past few decades, while the world has become ever more complex, it has also become increasingly homogenized, especially online. Wherever we turn, be it music, movies, t.v., or, heaven forbid, content writing, things are looking more and more the same. And the primary reason for this is simple: formulas work. The more examples we have, the easier it is to derive the formulas of what makes a given piece of media successful. And once we have those formulas, the easier it is to create more works that are very similar. Or, more recently, the easier it is for a.i. bots to create works that are very similar.
To me, having a robust vocabulary is a way, maybe the only way, to keep from being overwhelmed by a sea of banality. And that means having on hand lots of words that might be synonyms but not quite because of nuance that can be employed against formulas to express complexity.
But all of this discussion with a question of house and home and while, over the past three issues, we’ve talked about what makes a synonym, examined house and home as our prime example, and talked about the potential for a.i. to change how we teach vocabulary with relation to synonymy, we haven't actually discussed many synonyms for either house or home.
So, I'll close out this opening chapter of Volume 6 by offering the following synonyms for home, from Thesaurus.com:
central, familiar, family, local, native, at ease, at rest, and in one's element
And by giving you these altogether more complex words for house, from the Highly Selective Thesaurus for the Extraordinarily Literate:
house n. barabara, bastide, casita, chickee, columbary, crannog, dacha, earth lodge, galerie house, hale, hogan, hospitium, izba, jacal, palapa, pathan, pied-à- terre, ribat, wanigan, yurt
The Pitch
If you'd like to support my work and this newsletter, please consider becoming a subscriber. You'll get two extra newsletters a month discussing all the non-synonymy related stuff in my brain. If that's not in the cards at the moment, no biggie.
What We're Reading
The Puzzler
by A.J. Jacobs
A.J. Jacobs is something of a madman. He decides upon odd, often quixotic quests, and then builds his life around them for days or months or even years at a time. Then he writes a book about it. This time around, Jacobs has decided to get to the bottom of puzzles - why we like them, what they do for us, and even a bit about how to solve them. Written with Jacobs' usual wit and charm, this is a solidly satisfying read, even if you've never done a crossword puzzle.
Additionally, it means "to come back to" as in money or luck will return to you.
My hands-down favorite aspect of Japanese culture are the puns that are baked into the fabric of everyday life.
Think of it as a more subtle variation on the "home sweet home" cross-stitch panels hanging in a lot of American homes.
I was not smart enough to write down the name of the book and I have not actually managed to find it again. Because, as I said, I am not smart.
Except, if two things as different from each other as a frog and a toad can be synonyms, can't everything be a synonym for anything else? In a word, yes. We'll get to it, stick around.