English Synonyms and Antonyms — A verbal autopsy for the true word nerd

It was 11:45 PM on a Tuesday. I was staring at a stack of sophomore essays that suggested the only adjective my students know is "relatable." My eyes were burning. I needed a palate cleanser. Not a story—I couldn't handle a plot right now—but something that would restore my faith in the precision of the English language. Enter James Champlin Fernald.

I didn't expect to listen to a dictionary. Who does that? But desperation makes you do strange things. I put this on while grading the last few papers, hoping for some background noise that wasn't the hum of the refrigerator. What I found was a weirdly hypnotic verbal autopsy.

Fernald doesn't just list words; he dissects them. He explains the difference between "knowledge" and "wisdom" with the pedantic joy of a Victorian schoolmaster. It's nineteen hours of a guy telling you exactly why you're using words wrong. And honestly? I loved it. It's rigid, it's prescriptive, and it's from 1914, so it's full of that dusty, formal syntax that makes me feel like I'm wearing a tweed jacket even when I'm in pajamas. That same kind of meticulous, almost obsessive attention to craft shows up in Dressmakers of Auschwitz—though in a context that's infinitely more harrowing.

Now, we have to talk about the elephant in the audio booth: LibriVox. If you've never rolled the dice on a LibriVox recording, you're in for a chaotic treat. It's a community potluck. You might get ten minutes of a narrator with a soothing, NPR-ready baritone, followed immediately by a chapter recorded by someone who sounds like they're shouting into a laptop microphone in a wind tunnel.

Normally, this inconsistency drives me up the wall. I usually tap out the second I hear a fan whirring in the background. But here—weirdly—it works. Because there's no narrative arc to break, the shifting voices actually help keep you awake. It turns a nineteen-hour lecture into a series of micro-lessons. Just when your brain starts to fog over from hearing twenty synonyms for "poverty," a new voice cuts in with a thick Midwestern accent to wake you up.

I tried listening to this on my lakefront walk with Denise. She lasted exactly four minutes before asking if I was punishing her. She's right. This isn't for casual listening. It's not for the commute. It's for the insomniac word nerd. It's for the writer trying to fix a clunky sentence. It's basically a meditation app for people who get angry at bad grammar. Skip it if you need anything resembling entertainment—but if you've ever spent twenty minutes choosing between "however" and "nevertheless," welcome home.

My students would absolutely hate this. They'd call it "extra." But next time one of them writes that Gatsby was "very sad," I'm going to play them the entry on "Despair" until they understand the difference.