Language and words

Years ago I thought I'd read that William Shakespeare had an active vocabulary of over 100,000 words.  I tried to imagine how many words there were in an average English dictionary and gave up, but the figure of 100,000 seemed staggering to me.  So yesterday I looked it up online and found that some people had actually spent time counting the number of words Shakespeare used in his plays and what not.  They came up with this:

In his collected writings, Shakespeare used 31,534 different words. 14,376 words appeared only once and 846 were used more than 100 times.

I can't imagine being tasked with doing the accounting.  Moreoever, how do you decide whether 'fore and before count as two separate words or not?  Is 'tis a separate word?  And how boring must one's life be to not only want to count the words but actually do it?

Be that as it may, the same article I read goes on to state the following:

Using statistical techniques, it's possible to estimate how many words he knew but didn't use.

This means that in addition the 31,534 words that Shakespeare knew and used, there were approximately 35,000 words that he knew but didn't use. Thus, we can estimate that Shakespeare knew approximately 66,534 words.

Feel free to follow the link.   I spared myself.

As a devotee of language, I'm fascinated by this and worried at the same time.  Nowadays, from what I understand, social media is corrupting our ability to use simple as well as complex declarative sentences.  Contractions such as aight and whassup are overtaking the language.  It's getting that those of us of a certain vintage need a decoder ring to understand not only what the young people are saying but what the MSM is saying, since the MSM is aping what the trends seem to be.  Then add things like Twitter that require blurbs to contain no more than 140 characters, forcing people to economize for the sake of putting as much content into their messages as possible and the result is the dumbing down of the English-speaking people.

Circumlocutions are no better.  The likes of William F. Buckley are to be despised as much as admired for their use of obscure and sometimes moribund words that comes off more as an attempt to impress than an attempt to communicate clearly.  The use of Latin or French phrases may or may not count in the equation, but again using such linguistic forms grates more than it impresses.  It always cracks me up when someone's trying to use a highfalutin word and does so incorrectly, as last night someone was trying to show off her Ivy League education by using the word simpatico at absolutely the wrong time.   We've all done it at times, but I get a kick out of it when someone's putting on airs.

To return to the seminal point of this post, I wonder how many words I actually know and use correctly.  Karen corrected me on my use of turgid which, now that I've looked up the word, I see that I used correctly but in a little used way.  Do I know ten thousand words?  Twenty thousand?  Five thousand?  How would anyone be able to quantify it, since my writings are nowhere near as copious as Willy the Shakes?  What would someone do with Lope de Vega, the prolific Spanish playwright who wrote Fuenteovejuna among his more than 6,000 pieces of work?

Communication is becoming a lost art, at least insofar as standardized language is concerned.  With the focus turning more and more to computers, binary language is replacing the written word.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles