This week, I had a gentleman named Kevin Kawa in the office to show him around the administrative tool for his new blog about television. He had sent in several suggestions for a title, and we kicked them around the office and settled on .
Not two days later, I saw that the company had added Facebook Connect to their TV startup. It's name? .
It got me ruminating on language. Given barely similar circumstances – basically, evening television as a topic and a need for an Internet-friendly title – people who have never met will select precisely the same language, despite the many combinations of words possible.
Upon my mentioning that to Kevin, he sent me a disheartening e-mail that I didn't bother to fact-check, because I don't really want the verification: the average adult English speaker uses a vocabulary of about a thousand words.
If that's true, the paragraph above this one – which isn't very long – includes over three percent of the vocabulary the typical person uses.
And in the midst of this thinking, I came across the note you see on this week's . If you don't read PostSecret, spend some time with it. It's a nice project, and it's helping lots of people.
The note about all the postcards sounding like they're written by the same person recalled for me my thoughts this week about our limited shared vocabulary.
Perhaps the limited part of that is related to the .
The third-person effect relates to the persuasiveness of mass media. The typical person will say, "I'm not very affected by mass media messages [like advertising], but other people are very affected."
Maybe we're looking for a lowest common denominator in our word use, particularly if we're trying to reach a very large audience.
But sometimes situations call for uncommon words, so why shouldn't we use them? I really couldn't .
Spear's research does appear to support Kevin's e-mail, and really puts it in perspective when it comes to the number of words available to us that we're not using:
Richard Lederer, a lion among linguistics, tells us that English is the most cheerfully democratic language in the history of mankind. It has 616,500 entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. This compares with a vocabulary of about 185,000 words for German, 130,000 for Russian, and 100,000 for French. Yet the average English speaker possesses a vocabulary of 10,000 to 20,000 words, Lederer observes, but actually uses only a fraction of that, the rest being recognition or recall vocabulary.
Yes, I was the dork who knew what omphaloskepsis (which, by the way, spell-check doesn't recognize) meant when it came up as a word in a bluffing round.
What words can you teach me today?