Professor David Crystal, a language researcher, suggests that a person can estimate the size of his vocabulary by taking a sample twenty pages from a basic dictionary, counting the words he knows, dividing by the number of sample pages, then multiplying by the number of pages in the dictionary. Only savants, lexicographers, and championship Scrabble players know more than 100,000 or so. The English language has between one and two million words, more than any other language, and a new word is coined every 98 minutes. If you can’t give a name to something, you can’t think it. A word comes into existence when it is used by one person and understood by another. The larger the vocabulary, the more concise the writing.Ī writer’s vocabulary is her toolbox and a reader’s vocabulary is his key to reading comprehension. Using too many words to make one’s point can be annoying, but having precisely the right words at one’s disposal eliminates the need for added description and explanation. Logorrhoeic means a pathologically excessive and sometimes incoherent tendency to wordiness. Pooterish alludes to a fictional character in a comic English novel and means self-important and narrow-minded. I had to look up both Pooterish and logorrhoeic.
“A Pooterishly embarrassing piece…A fire-lighter of vanity, self-pity and logorrhoeic dullness” sniped one critic. They don’t sugarcoat their book reviews either. “So mental a political tap-dance, that it makes riding a porcupine bareback over a cliff seem the sane thing to do.” “Now is the time to stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood.” Anyone who has listened to their comments and complaints about Britain’s messy exit from the European Union has to agree they have a flair for expression. The British public seems to have and make use of a more diverse mix of words in their everyday speech than Americans. On that sceptered isle, it’s not just the writers who wield a formidable vocabulary.
The insertion of the French phrase sounds a tad pretentious and pedantic, but the astounding thing to me was that the writer expected the average British newspaper reader to know what he meant. One editorialist described the House of Lords as a “worm farm of claret-gargling, bien pensant quangocrats.” I was pretty confident about the meaning of worm farm and claret, but had to slink off to Wiktionary to learn that a bien pensant quangocrat was a more or less orthodox member of a quasi-governmental organization. Journalists don’t dumb down their prose or tone down their political observations. Reading the morning newspapers is a humbling experience. You can learn more about Jeanne’s books at Įvery time I visit Great Britain, I come home with an expanded vocabulary. Where the Bones Are Buried, the fifth book in the series, is in bookstores now. She currently lives in Renton, Washington with her husband who is a law professor. Originally from Georgia, she enjoys traveling the world and learning about other cultures and customs, which she incorporates into her novels. Like her amateur sleuth, Jeanne was born with a serious wanderlust. Jeanne Matthews is the author of the Dinah Pelerin international mysteries published by Poisoned Pen Press.
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