Can you guess how many words there are in
the English language? I bet you can’t.
According to the Global Language
Monitor, the number of words in the English Language is 1,025,109. Even more
surprising, a new word is created every 98 minutes for an average of 14.7 words
per day. The average English-speaking adult has
a vocabulary of about 20,000-30,000 words. For myself, as an attorney, writer,
English major and geeky logophile, I like to think I'm above average but, too
often, I find I'm at a loss for words. Not technical terms or high-brow
concepts, but plain old words. I could blame my age (I just turned 55) or I
could blame my iPhone (where Siri is at my beck and call to answer any silly
question, day or night), or I could blame myself for not trying hard enough. A
myriad of concepts, movies, books, and people have decided my brain was too
darn crowded, so they hit the road leaving me with my only two vague and
useless phrases: That…thing, you know
what I mean and that…guy, you
remember him…
I
believe the true culprit is convenience. For example, I remember every
important phone number from my childhood, including my grandparents'
number--and they have been gone twenty-five years. Today, the only phone number
I am confident I know is my own; every other number is stored on my phone. Here
is another example, say I want to know the definition of a word I've typed, I
can simply right-click on it. What's more, I can translate it into dozens of
languages including Hindi, Swahili and Mandarin. Just now, I right-clicked on
the word number and learned that its
synonyms are: amount, quantity, sum, figure, numeral, digit, and integer. Sure,
I could have come up with those words without a lot of effort, but why would I
bother? I have better things to do, even if I can't think of any at the
moment…
There
is a second culprit I blame for my diminishing vocabulary, for rewriting
my life story into a mystery I call "The
Case of the Purloined People, Places and Things". Rats, I meant nouns, of course. That culprit is the
pictograph, a pictorial symbol for a word or phrase. You know them as
emojis. The endless supply of clever emojis has led me to forgo words and
replace them with pictures: hearts, fireworks, sad face, mad face,
caterpillars--you name it, I've used it. If you think about it, the oldest cave
painting in the world is 40,000 years old (pre-dating the oldest known alphabet
by 36,000 years) and we have been perfecting spoken and written language ever
since. Or so we thought. Given my reliance on emojis to communicate, I realize
we have come full circle. Maybe there was nothing to perfect, we had it right
from the beginning and all this time we have been chasing our tails. I don't
know about you, but I feel so much better knowing that I don't need to scrounge
around for the perfect word anymore. A symbol works just fine :-D
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