Welcome to the frustrating, oddly lovable world of “word-jamming.”
😩 I’m just bad at English
That’s what I’ve told myself for years—
especially when it comes to vocabulary.
No matter how much I studied,
I could never seem to remember words.
And when I could kind of guess the sentence structure,
I still didn’t know what it was really trying to say.
Recently, while writing more in English,
I noticed something,
“There are too many similar-looking words.”
🫠Spelling close, meaning far
When I try to recall the meaning of increase,
my brain offers include instead.
I know include means “to contain.”
Still for some reason, that knowledge keeps blocking the new one.
When I see determine, I hear data mining.
I don’t know why. I just do.
And when I look at maintain, I get main Thema.
That one’s not even English. Even I know that’s wrong.
So I’ve started calling this phenomenon “word-jamming,”
when a word I’m trying to recall gets blocked—
by another, similar-looking or -sounding word.
I call those intruders jamming words.
😵💫 My Jamming List
Here’s a handful of jamming pairs I’ve had to wrestle with.
If you’re a native English speaker, this might make zero sense.
If you’re learning English, you might laugh (or cry) in recognition.
{
"behavioral": ["behind"],
"particularly": ["party", "patient"],
"increasing": ["include"],
"fidelity": ["modify"],
"maintain": ["main Thema"],
"rely": ["reply"],
"embedded": ["embalming"],
"determine": ["data mining"],
"consistency": ["coexistence"],
"reflect": ["reframing", "relief"],
"appropriate": ["apologize", "appreciate"]
}
🥸Understanding means dividing
In Japanese, there’s an idea that “to understand” means “to divide.”
You don’t truly grasp something until you can separate it from what it’s not.
Maybe vocabulary is like that too.
It’s not just about memorizing definitions—
but about recognizing confusion.
Naming the interference. Dividing the signals.
Kind of like structural linguistics.
(Saussure would be proud, I think. I don’t actually know. Don’t quote me.)
Anyway—
for now, I’ll just keep building my own jamming list,
and maybe learn to find some humor in it 🤨
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