Learning a new word is like finding a new color. You start noticing it everywhere.

Words do not only describe what you notice, they change what you are able to notice. A feeling or a pattern with no name stays blurry, and the moment there is a word for it, examples appear everywhere, as though the world had been waiting. Nothing changed outside you. Your resolution went up.

Collect words the way you collect anything else you use: one at a time, and only the ones that caught you. Look up the next one you half understand instead of sliding past it. Say it out loud within a few days so it stops being decoration and becomes usable.