How can I learn more sophisticated vocabulary words for writing?

I’ll tell you what, you could start by reading anything by Anthony bloody Burgess, the old gobshite. Do you know what a catamite is? No, you and nearly everybody else, but Burgess uses that in the first sentence of Earthly Powers. Septentrional? That’s in there somewhere. Four bloody times that book had me going to the dictionary, except for the fact that I was reading it whilst out and about, so it had me saying “right Burgess, you fecker, that’s a word you’ve bloody well made up, I think, so where’s me Google and I’m going to look”. Four bloody times. Most books are lucky if they do it bloody once.

A Clockwork Orange is nearly as bad because half of it uses real Russian words but transliterated into Anglo terms and Alex speaks like a messianic loony, which I suppose is the entire point.

If you are of a masochistic turn of mind you could try Dickens. Many wish we had tried Dickens, and ordered him to stop before he unleashed Great Expec-bloody-tations on an unsuspecting public.

If you are completely oblivious to pain you might want to roll your orbs over Thomas Hardy. Most people start with either Jude the Obscure or Tess of the d’Urbervilles but these are in fact the literary equivalent of gateway drugs and within a couple of years, if you aren’t careful, you’ll find yourself mainlining Far From the Madding Crowd and by the time you’re sniffing up Return of the Native off a rent boy’s bottom you’re too far gone to fully recover. I use Hardy novels to get a seat to myself on crowded trains. Nobody wants to be near anybody loopy enough to be reading one of those. But you will get some magniloquent lexemes out of ‘em. After Hardy, cavalier and reckless souls go on to Virginia Woolf. Look, if you do, it’s at your own risk, and don’t say you haven’t been warned, because it’s only a short step from there to James Joyce, and then that’s it, game over for you, because by that time anything you write will be understood by about three people, one of whom is Derek Flappit, who lives in a flat above a chip shop in Dagenham and is the star contributor to the leading website for conspiracy theorists, Grassy Knoll. On there they scoff at the theory that the moon landings were a hoax because what sort of lame-arsed conspiracy theorist believes that the Moon exists? Pfft!

Er…..was there a question? There was? What was it? Back to the top of this I go and oh, yes, that. Right.

I’m not convinced that you’re going the right way here, old top. Filling your prosework with orotundity alone is often the sign of somebody showing off their acquaintanceship with the dictionary rather than that with wordsmithery, whatever it may look like when you’ve ploughed through one of Beardy Chaz’s chapters.

Oh, you don’t believe me, eh? Well, let’s have a look at one of the hirsute one’s shiniest beacons, shall we? It goes like this:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

There’s nothing in there that a fifteen-year-old couldn’t understand (well, unless he’s a fifteen year old that doesn’t speak English, to avoid the march of the inevitable hordes of the pedantry that will manifest itself should I leave that sentence unappended, and furthermore yes it could be a she as well, you feminists, and no, I’m not going to go into the six billion recently founded pronouns for LGBTQXYZ123AMDINTEL+CUPPA& or whatever it is you call yourself this week, because we’ll be here all bloody day if I do) but what there is anaphora. Lots and lots of anaphora. The whole thing screams anaphora at you. Anaphora there could not be more anaphoric were it the international day of anaphora. There is also juxtaposition. And a stinging satirical slap at the end there to the noisiest authorities, the sort of people to whom I refer far less politely than does Dickens as vociferous onanists, because unlike Dickens I am a septentrional oik.

The point (in case you were wondering) is that although a colossal vocabulary can put a bit of polish on things it is first necessary to grasp the craft of making the shoe in the first place and often the simpler the better; shoving in ornate baroque codas to your prosework is a secondary, not primary consideration.

And don’t forget to blame the EU. Ursula von der Longwords.