Working on a paper for my Japanese art class I realized my vocabulary has diminished. I still understand most of the words I ever learned, but accessing them as I write something is another matter. I attribute this only partly to aging. I think most of my problem stems from my previous employment. I was training people to use computer publishing programs and writing documentation for the training. Good documentation uses simple language, along with those technical terms, and never uses synonyms or nuance. You never call a black box a widget; it’s always a black box. Otherwise you are talking about two different things. I began writing this blog so I could forget those technical writing rules. Now I’ve added a thesaurus to my Google homepage. I hope it’s better than the one that comes with Microsoft Word. That was obviously compiled by technical writers.