The
current Oxford English Dictionary, most recently revised in the 1980s,
contains over 500,000 definitions. It’s claimed that the average
college-educated English speaker typically has a working vocabulary of more
than 100,000 words.
They must have been talking about a previous era of college graduates, as
many of the newer ones I’ve worked with seem to get by with a few orders of
magnitude less than that number. Perhaps it’s a sign of ongoing biological
evolution. Language centers in the brain are shrinking beyond all sense of
reasonable proportion, to the diminished size needed to minimally comprehend
rap music lyrics.
In 1930, C. K. Ogden (in collaboration with I. A. Richards) devised an
ultra-truncated version of English. It consisted of just 850 words that could
be learned in a few months and used to say anything. He called it Basic
English (BE). It was demonstrated that practically anything could be said with
these few words – even novels and scientific papers were written in BE. It
never caught on. Perhaps to many people living in that era, it sounded too
much like Newspeak, the government-mandated language in George Orwell’s
ominous, anti-totalitarian novel 1984. And BE didn’t contain any
idioms, which form the true heart and soul of any language.
It appears that human vocabularies are marching steadily toward the same
place that Prof. Ogden wanted to go. A modern form of "Basic English" seems to
be spontaneously creating itself as we speak. It will be comprised
entirely of idioms, expletives, grunts and a few unintelligible
conjunctions.
I once had a sizeable vocabulary, bolstered over the years by much reading
on many different subjects, and by a good deal of technical writing at my job.
But now, words that I once clutched dearly and proudly to my bosom are leaking
away from me like spinal fluid draining through a sieve. My mental sponge
seems to be calcifying relentlessly, day by day.
In my case, this isn’t the onset of Alzheimer’s disease; it’s simply one of
those unsolicited reminders from Mother Nature that I’ve outlived any useful
biological purpose. Like a cat scratching lightly at the door in the
middle of the night, Her quiet importuning has become very bothersome. It’s a
give-and-take relationship, though: I give up words and memories, and I take
new aches and pains in return. I can deal with the aches and pains. I only
wish I could choose the damned words I have to give up. Like
importune. Why not take that one?
Why do I keep words that I don’t really need, like syzygy and
defenestrate, and have to give up the needful ones, like my computer
passwords, the names of my fellow workers, or the names of common objects or
actions? I certainly don’t need to retain the word "aegis" when I can always
say "sponsorship". Who needs the word "inculcate" when they can use "teach",
"instruct", "impress upon" or "indoctrinate"? Unfortunately, it’s the simpler
words that seem to take flight when I try to retrieve them from their cozy
gray pigeonholes upstairs. Sometimes I’m forced to dredge up an esoteric
synonym, with the predictable result that people often don’t have a clue as to
what I just said. Or, if they do, they consider me to be snobbish and
condescending. Well, OK, I suppose I can be a bit snobbish at times…
As my own vocabulary continues to ebb, perhaps my life will take on a
simpler, more uncluttered aspect. After all, the only thing words really do is
express particular feelings -- sensations, observations, mental states. You
can survive without nouns, so long as you can point. The loss of verbs would
simply lead to a more passive mode of living. But the feelings, ah, the
feelings are there whether you can pin a name on them or not. And in the
final analysis, of all those 500,000 English words, there are really only
three of them that are worth knowing:
Wait -- it’ll come to me, just give me a minute…
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