Originally Posted by
AuntShecky
Way back "in the day" when I was substituting for ESOL teachers, I used to ask the students what was the most difficult thing about learning English. I thought that they would say it was grammar in general, or the irregular endings for verbs, or even the fact that English syntax hinges upon word order instead of inflected endings. Nope. Although all of the students told me that they thought learning English was extremely difficult, the worst part for them was the extensive vocabulary.
Just the other day I read in the newspaper (the old-fashioned print kind) that English has over two million words, with new ones added everyday. Not only are there numerous nouns and modifiers (adjectives, adverbs), just one word can have multiple meanings. So what is a blessing for native speakers can be a bane to those struggling to learn English.
To your problem though, which, I gather, involves difficulty in trying to come up with words to describe architectural features in your writing:
My question is, unless you are writing for a specific audience consisting of architects or engineers, why is description "required?" If you're writing a literary or a mainstream story, your readers won't know the exact term and though we always read "to learn something new," the usual motive for reading fiction is to be entertained, primarily.
Since fiction, especially short stories, thrives on economy of expression, the writer doesn't necessarily have to include lengthy descriptions of anything, villas or anything else. For instance, you wouldn't have to provide a detailed description of every tiny thread of fabric, but just a thumbnail swatch will inform us of what the whole cloth looks like.
In a story where setting is so important that it's almost a character, even then we don't need to have every square inch of the room reproduced. Just a few carefully-placed sentences and phrases is enough to tell us what the room is like. There are many examples of this: just off the top of my head I can think of "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gillman and Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."
A few lines of skillfully-rendered dialogue would likewise give us a glimpse of what the character is like. We don't really need to know how tall he is, or how the sunlight bounces off his hair, or how much his eyes sparkle -- unless his height or hairdo or peepers are integral to the theme of the story.
Back to your original question, if you can't come up with the exact word you want to describe something, think of an analogy! That's what writers do, or at least the ones who disdain the use of clichés and prefer to come up with something new. For instance, Stanley Elkin in his religious satire, The Bitter End, describes Heaven as looking like a "theme park."
I don't know if all this will help or not, but in any case, I wish you best of luck in your writing efforts.
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