Words!

RHYS BOWEN:  Our society is losing many things: civility, culture, empathy but above all WORDS. The young generation communicates with texts. LOL  WTF etc. During Covid my rather shy granddaughter was confined to her room and not doing well.  I suggested she call some friends to chat.  Nobody chats, Nana, she said.

I saw an interview on TV with a juvenile offender. When he spoke he sounded angry all the time and every third sentence was "Know what I mean? Know what I mean?"  The problem was we didn't know what he meant because he lacked the words to  express it.

My grandmother and great aunt had huge vocabularies. They spoke in complete sentences. They read extensively.  Maybe the Victorian era was in some ways the high point of civilization. So many inventions, good literature, a relatively peaceful world.  of course we won't mention colonial domination, awful slums, child labor... but I feel we have gone downhill from there. Two world wars, the rise of technology and, worst of all for us writers, the drop in reading. We are now writing for an elite few, most of them in the older generation. When they are gone will there be anyone else who wants to read as an escape?

My daughter teaches at a fabulous Montessori school, K-8. Their library is open during lunch hour and my daughter says it is always full of kids sprawled on couches and bean bags reading their favorite books. They also have a period every day called DEAR.  Drop Everything And Read. 

If only more schools were like that. But I feel we are all to blame. I notice my own vocabulary is limited these days. "Where did we put that thing? That whatsit?  How are you?  I'm good.  Not I'm well, which is correct.  I am trying to keep or recover some sort of vocabulary.  I subscribe to something called Word Genius that sends me a new word every day. Some days I feel smug because I already know it. Other days it's like today: 

No, I have never used that word in my life! I probably never will, but there are some words I think I know but I don't really. When John was saying that something was the most ridiculous thing he'd ever heard I commented that he should stop resorting to hyperbole.  That felt good.

But I saw this list the other day. I think I know all of these words.  Do you? And how do you think we can stop this horrible erosion of culture?

So who got a perfect score?

And do you have any suggestions about how we can improve our vocabularies and get kids to read? Harry Potter was amazing as it hooked a whole generation. Maybe we should stop writing for adults and write some more arresting children's lit.

Words We didn't know!

RHYS BOWEN:
Writing about the past I have to continually remind myself that people had much bigger vocabularies. They spoke in long, full sentences. My great aunt would never have said “You know” or “like” or described something as “that thing”. They rarely used contractions. I will, not I’ll. I cannot, not I can’t. They read extensively and they used all those words when they spoke. I suppose they had more time. Their lives weren’t as rushed.
I have always considered that I am an educated person and I have a good vocabulary. However I’ve noticed it shrinking recently. Where did I put that thing? John asks. What thing? You know, that thing we brought back from thewhatsit store.  We’ll be down to caveman grunts soon!

So….I have recently subscribed to something called Word Genius. It gives me a new word of the day and I’m embarrassed to say that so far I have known none of them!
Here are some from the past few days:
Esurient.  Do you know what it means? Ten points if you do. It means hungry.
Lambent.   It means glowing softly.
Otiose.  It means useless, pointless.
Gibbous. It means convex, bulgy. A gibbous moon.
Sobriquet… this I was familiar with but don’t think I had ever used it in conversation. It means a familiar form of ones name or a nickname. Lady Georgiana’s sobriquet is Georgie and her brother’s is Binky.
(Actually after the first week I have known most of them so I'm not quite as hopeless as I thought)

I have been surprised throughout my life that I have come across new words to me and have had to add them to my vocabulary. I didn’t know what Nemesis was until I read Agatha Christie.
I knew about zenith but didn’t realize its opposite was a nadir.
Juggernaut was outside my vocabulary until large trucks in England were referred to by that name.
And an ombudsman? What the heck was that when I first read of it in the newspaper. But where on earth did it come from?
Then there are words that I’m always confused about because they sound like the opposite of what they really mean:
Bucolic.  Doesn’t that sound like something nasty? A disease? And yet it means an idyllic country setting, doesn’t it?
Sanguine: another word that sounds nasty. Something to do with a vampire!

So DEAR REDS  do you have large vocabularies? Are you often coming across words you don’t know? And did you know the meaning of those words I shared from Word Genius?

JENN McKINLAY: Well, I thought my vocabulary was pretty good. I knew lambent and sobriquet, but otiose? That's a new one and I love it. So thank you for sharing that, Rhys! I'll try not to wear it out. My mother was a librarian so we were a wordy house. You could never just get a definition out of the woman. It was always a big production to go to the dictionary and look stuff up. Small wonder I became a librarian, too. Back when the NYT Book Review was a weighty insert worth an entire Sunday afternoon, I used to write down any words used in the articles that I didn't know. By the end of the year, I had quite the vocab list. And now I must be off to go sign up for Word Genius!

LUCY BURDETTE: We have the same conversation over and over Rhys. Do you know where that thing is? one of us asks. Use your nouns, John will often say. (Can you see me sticking my tongue out?) My theory is that we have so much stuffed into our heads by now that it takes a while for the brain to grind through and find the right word. But even so I'm going to check out Word Genius too...

HALLIE EPHRON: I frequently trip over unknown words in The New Yorker and in The New York Times. The Times has printed lists of their most frequently looked-up words. One year, the #1 most looked up word: panegyric. #2: immiscible. I don't know what either one means. Most of the rest of the words on their list I know: churlish, risible, anathema...  The word I most often think means the opposite of what it does: nonplussed. Also ingenuous.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Agrarian sounds like it shouldn't mean that, right? I think it should mean angry all the time. Riparian, too. It should be someone in the Rotary Club. I knew most of those Rhys, but I don't use them. (Except for sanguine, which I use all the time, weirdly.) They're like, available words, but I hardly take them out of the cabinet. Knowing them and using them are so different! And when a word sticks out, is that ..a good thing?   Noisome is a frustrating one--and enervate. They should just change the meanings. I found an old notebook I had from collage and I had kept a vocabulary list for myself. One of the exotic words was "ecology." Ah, times do change.

And the noun-loss disease? Seriously, I am so worried about it that I actively try to avoid it.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Rhys! I am now hooked on Word Genius! I played Daily Word until I got to one that completely stumped me--Resfeber! I did guess the correct answer, but it was only through process of elimination. Resfeber is the feeling of excitement before a trip or journey. Who knew? It's a Swedish word, because there is no English word that quite encapsulates the feeling. (There, I used a big word without thinking!) Seriously, English is such a rich and complex language. But I fear our collective vocabulary is shrinking every day. But I don't want to lose mine, and am constantly looking up words when I'm reading books or the newspapers. Shamefully, however, I have to admit that I seldom use a paper dictionary these days--it's so much easier to just type a word into the online one.

HANK: Even easier..I just yelled: 'Hey Alexa, what does immiscible mean?" And she said: "immiscible means the incapability of two things being mixed together."  Whoa.

RHYS: Alexa knows everything! Scary.

So now it's your turn. Do you find your vocabulary is shrinking? Do you find some words that are confusingly different from their meanings?

Taking Pride

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: So a couple days ago, I spotted a certain quiz result popping up on Twitter. You know the sort - what drink are you? What's your house at Hogwarts? I normally ignore the impulse to jump in and take the test, mostly because I read an article once about SCARY EMAIL FARMERS taking your address from Buzzfeed quizzes and using it to send unsuspecting people spam offers for opioids and generic Viagra.

But this one I took, because it was a vocabulary test. Here's my result:

That's right, I've got a huge vocabulary. Bigger than several other authors, and I know, because I spent an hour searching for similar results on Twitter. I am wicked proud of my vocabulary - but it struck me, as I was patting myself on the back, that I have no idea why I get so much self-affirmation from being a walking dictionary. 

It's not like I use a lot of $14 words when writing fiction. On the contrary, I try to keep my language somewhat stripped down. (Although I did use the word defenestrate in one of my books. It's delightfully precise, that word.) I speak pretty much like everyone else - I may have an active vocabulary of slightly more than the average 20,000 words, but lets face it, shopping at Hanneford, going out for pizza and chatting with neighbors at the town dump transfer station doesn't require one to use the words lugubrious or teratogenic. (I did use the word thermocline when talking to Youngest the other day when describing the heating up process - or lack thereof - of our shower.)

I haven't even monetized my achievement by tutoring kinds on SAT vocabulary words. (I understand that in the right neighborhood, tutors can get up to $15,000 these days!)  I have to conclude I'm proud of my suberabundant  lexicon just because it's cool to me, in the same way some folks are proud of their completely alphabetized vinyl collection or their ability to play the Peruvian nose flute.

It got me thinking about the other utterly useless skills in which I glory. Being able to wiggle my nostrils (maybe I should try to Peruvian flute.) The ability to make perfectly engineered book covers out of paper grocery sacks (this is useful, except stretchy book covers are less than a dollar and don't take thirty minutes to put on.) The way I can pick out and sing the harmony line while listening to pop songs on the radio. 

There are many things that stir pride in us because they are genuine accomplishments. There are others - hopefully fewer - that we take pleasure in because they enable us to also be quietly superior, like making perfect lane-to-lane turns in traffic or having the cleanest and best-sorted recyclables at the Transfer Station. (Okay, I was talking about me. Did you guess?) 

But there's a happy purity to achievements that just don't mean that much to anyone else - like learning to play the ukulele, or being able to recite all the states capitols in alphabetical order (by state, of course.) In our culture, where everything has to be branded, monetized, useful and busy, it's a sweet thing to know you can recite all of Evangeline - even if absolutely no one will ever ask you to do so.

How about you, dear readers? What useless skills and accomplishments do you delight in?