I’ve been posting every day because a single entry just looks sad, regardless of how new the blog is. After today, the entries won’t be near as often, and perhaps consequentially better written.
Your thesaurus speaks lies, or at least encourages you to believe things that are untrue. There is no word that means the same as the one you’re looking at. Why should there be? If two words meant the same thing surely one would be forced into oblivion. Consider, for example, the word Happy. Its listed synonyms include blessed, blest, captivated, content, intoxicated, looking good, pleasant, and peaceful.
As for the first two, they imply an outside force acting upon the noun that the adjective modifies. The word happiness and its meaning requires no such intervention.
The third is my favorite. It means to be taken captive and is not dissimilar to “enraptured” (rapere being Latin for seized). A moment is captivating if it draws into itself your being, against your will. The word is much more euphoric than “happy” ever plans on being.
“Content” by way of contrast, says considerably less than “happy.” In fact many today use it in a negative form, as a lesser of “apathetic.”
Intoxication implies a lack of control. I sincerely hope that whenever one is happy it is not because their thinking apparatus is not functioning properly. Such would be a sad existence indeed.
“Looking Good” is a strange phrase to say matches meaning with “happy.” Perhaps it speaks to society’s fixation on physical appearance. Perhaps it is an issue caused by the male-dominance in language. More likely, the editor wanted more entries for such a commonly used word as “happy” and so let it slide elasticity and all.
Most anyone with good manners knows that “pleasant” and “happy” do not always coincide. At times they are in direct opposition of each other. Consider, for example, when someone you’re having a meal with implies something unkind about your views on the hegemonic State. It would be intensely amusing, and invoke much happiness, to pour your tea on them. The pursuit of being pleasant forbids it though (in that case…sometimes pleasantries are overrated, yes?).
There is a plethora of things that cannot be happy, but are very often described as peaceful. These include clouds, fields, monuments, corpses, banks (well, not in my experience have banks been “happy” anyway) and forests. Obviously if only one of two adjectives can accurately modify a single noun, the two are not the same.
The reason for such a tirade is this: those that use words others may not understand are not doing so in order to “show off [their] extensive vocabulary.” Well, perhaps some are. Don’t talk with them. Many are doing it in favor of precision. No designer I know of would say yellow-green when they mean chartreuse. A biologist would not say “mouth” if they meant “oral cavity.” It is not because of snobbery, it is because they know the distinction and do in fact differentiate the two.
Disclaimer: I do not fancy myself a linguist, and often say obtuse when I mean dense, verbose when I mean loquacious, or redundant when I mean superfluous. With what little knowledge I have of the language, I do my best.
