What exactly is the need for building up vocabulary or knowing new words over and above the common words ? I am not asking from academic perspective but trying to grasp the real need for learning new words. Some say that it helps express oneself better but how that’s not possible with the most commonly used words and rare words are anyways perhaps might not be comprehensible as they are uncommon. Isn’t simple and easy better ? Most books use uncommon words that are not spoken in day to day life. Request your views
by Excellent_Aside_2422
29 Comments
With a limited vocabulary, you can only sound repetitious and simplistic. With a broad vocabulary, you can choose how you want your writing to sound.
The more words you know, the more accurate you can be with your expressions.
Imagine if a doctor wrote “pain in arm-thingy, prolly broken lol” on your chart.
Among other things, it will help you express yourself with more accuracy and nuance.
The more words you know, the more you understand
Why write a symphony when you could write a song with two chords?
It’s fun and adds color to the world
Lively is a great description
Vivacious is such fun to say! And has a little extra edge to it
Beautiful prose has a rhythm that’s lovely to listen to – even if only in your head
(But also audiobooks are a great joy ^_^ )
There’s a place for simple words – Billy Collins certainly crafts moving, heartfelt poetry with small blocks
There’s space for longer words too
V for Vendetta would not be half the movie it is without flaunting some verdant vocabulary vibes
One can use pink instead of magenta
But it’s nice to have the option for both
A. A larger vocabulary means you can understand people and books that use different words.
B. Words are not exact synonyms , there are shades of meaning lost if you just use the simple words. It’s like living on white bread and government cheese – you can do it but you lose all the delight of different flavours and textures.
C. Every community has its own technical terms and jargon, if you don’t learn the words your neighbours and workmates use, you get left behind.
Its not a question of learning new words just to be sesquipedalian – using long words for the sake of it – it’s a question of both precision and joy in language.
Being articulate makes you dangerous and is a definite advantage.
It’s like a tool set. I can do basic jobs with basic tools, but if it’s something special, it requires the right tool for that job. There’s dozens of ways to describe something, but there’s always the best answer. I’d rather be pushed to learn what a new word means than be talked down too and read simplistic writings over and over
Why many words use. When less do much as good.
You’ve gotten some great answers. I’m just going to go with – so you don’t sound like a fucking idiot
even the simple easy words must be learned. teachers say you speak english with 100 words. would you be okay with just that? you could try. and you can technically paint with just five colors and represent everything. but nobody is that good. more paints means more accuracy, and more words means more accuracy. with 100 words you can build a village, but with real vocabulary helping you, more complex jobs become first possible, then easy. no spaceships were ever built without careful conversation and precise language. “the tolerance of the o-ring is 0.001 m” uses three vocabulary words and without it the challenger mission was lost. you just cant say that sentence meaningfully without some solid language. o-rings are not something anyone “eyeballs”, and .001 m tolerance is a meaningful concept that people must learn since nobody can feel it, but “tolerance” means “acceptable error that wont break stuff” here, and even that goes over peoples heads.
nobody who went to the moon knew that they would do that as a kid. they did their homework and prepared for anything. they could have built submarines just as easily. or fought a war.
but calling a post a tweet is not vocabulary. reach for powerful vocabulary, not the most basic popular garbage. knowing ten words for snow is not worth much.
learn some latin vocabulary, if you want to better understand english. learn a computer language vocabulary and try programming. or learn a whole language! you might think being able to say things in another language isnt useful; leave that aside, and it still trains your mind to work on a whole new level.
need makes it seem like you have a problem now, and you dont. but you have opportunities. among many things, native english speakers are prized english teachers (as long as they can learn some foreign vocabulary). its actually one of the few forms of education that comes with real employment opportunities.
Just shut up and do your homework kid.
I go by the “very” example.
That one word can be utilise to mean more/much. But read the difference and the thoughts that follow it.
Very angry – furious
Very hungry – Starving/ravenous
Very bad – atrocious
Very quiet – silent
Very tired – exhausted
The non “very” words convey a deeper volume and depth in comparison.
Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?
Not only does it help you express yourself, it essentially helps you think. If you lack language to describe something, be it a feeling, and object or anything else, its very hard to grasp the concept of it, let alone explain it to someone else. Sure, you could use common words, but you’ll be limited to what they represent in your thought process. For example, I might feel sadness—but maybe I actually feel grief, or melancholy, or longing, or yearning, or heartache (and so on). Most words aren’t exact synonyms; they represent shades of meaning you might want to convey or understand. Language even affects how you think about distinctions between things. Are light blue and blue shades or different colours, for example? Depends on what you call them in your native language.
Lacking language makes defining your identity harder, too. Sometimes people deliberately try to deny someone else the words to describe what is happening to them and/or what they are, and it’s a powerful tool that fucks you up.
I had a similar query as a teenager growing up in India. My mum offered a good analogy to get her point across- why have the color pink when we have red? Or why have light blue when we’ve navy? Words are like colors- they have a distinct meaning- they are like an ingredient in a recipe with distinct characteristic. Now of course the recipe will taste bad if you use too much or too little of an ingredient. So usually when you come across a bad writing it’s the writer and not words you should hate. Most well written books use simple words. Orwells advice on what makes a writing good is followed by many contemporary authors. Clarity is hallmark of good writing so i don’t know what books you’re referring to.
Using “domicile” for “home” in a casual setting will certainly be considered ridiculous.
But what if i wish to convey my exact feeling:
Say my gf cheats on me w my best friend. I’m certainly not as angry as I’m hurt and disappointed. So there is a specific word for that to express how i feel. This is what makes language beautiful
I’m with Borges with simple and easy. The message I think should be clear for the reader, in quantity and quality. However as – if I remember correctly – Wittgenstein said it, the limit of my language is the limit of my world. Some time we need specific words suited for what we want to express.
Did you really need five different subreddits to give you an answer to this question? If English is your second language, I can see how this would be of interest to you.
Words parse human experience into cognitively understandable bits that we can then think about, express to others, and relate to in written form. So, knowing more words gives you better insight into life, other people and yourself.
A larger vocabulary means you don’t sound like the orange imbecile that half of the United States is sucking up to and worshipping. It means you can have a conversation or even a debate without resorting to childish insults and taunts.
It means people don’t look at you and wonder what the hell is wrong with you.
More words = more specificity.
It’s like painting. You can do it using only primary colors without mixing them at all or just do it black and white. Or you can use all sorts of tones and shades, to achieve your result.
Just admit you’re done learning new words, and move on with your life. No one has to agree. It’s your life.
You sound like the guy I met in Japan who insisted this alphabet had too many letters because letters like X and Z weren’t needed. You don’t need the words Zebra when ‘striped horse’ supposedly “works just as well!”
I have to assume you’re a troll or something.
Edit: You posted this exact post to like 5 different subs, so like. Def a troll and/or spammer.
Depends where you live and how you want to communicate.
I was in a multinational military headquarters with English as the daily language. Lots of locals were teaching people English as a second language as they wanted to improve their working abilities.
Their instructions were: start with the Americans, then talk to the Canadians. Finally, talk to the Brits.
The AVERAGE American uses fewer different words to communicate than other English speakers.
A larger vocabulary makes communication more nuanced, more expressive, more fun.
You know how when you’re wearing shades … you can see well enough … but then you take them off and you realize there’s a lot more colors and hues than you could see with the shades on? That’s how knowing more words is: you don’t know how helpful it it and how much it expands your way of thinking (not only of expressing yourself) until you know a lot more words.
Even the most common concepts or emotions… it’s amazing when you realize how one word can make a lot of difference compared to another.
Just think it’s like having a full panoply of tools for your project, and they’ll award you infinitely more precision while you work than just having a standard set of 6 screwdrivers.
I love learning new words. I cannot relate to the desire to never expand one’s vocabulary…
The first thing that came to mind when I read this is how often people take a text or a quick email the wrong way. Using the right words provides clarity. When we try to be too brief or simple it can often leave too much room for interpretation which leads to miscommunication.
One book that I think highlights this really well is Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown. Most people have fewer than 5 words to describe their emotions. This book has definitions for 87 distinct emotions, all of which I have felt at some point in my life and now have the vocabulary to express them. Two words are nearly universally used wrong, envy and jealousy. We so often say I’m jelly or jealous when we actually mean envy. We think it seems nicer, but if you know the definition it’s actually the opposite. This is the power of vocabulary.
Another thing that I thought of was regional dialect. I’ve lived all of the the US and overseas in a both Europe and Asia. Although all the people I worked with spoke English, they all had different vocabulary depending on where they learned English or where they have lived. I’m not just talking about slang, but I can’t think of an example off the top of my head.
I think being exposed to people who use different vocabulary had helped me dramatically when I read books because I just know the meaning of more words or I can often guess by using context. This makes it easier to read a book without having to look up a word or phrase. I read a lot of international authors so I am coming across words that I’m not familiar with more often and do take the time to look them up.
Well, as an experiment, look at how you could have stated that paragraph in a more simple manner. You could have probably gotten the message across with “Why bother learning new words? Simple is better, no?” But there’s a lot of nuance that would be lost.
A lot of vocabulary building feels more academic than useful, that’s true. But there’s another aspect to reading, which involves exercising your brain. That requires challenge, in a similar manner as you’d exercise muscles. And you could see general life improvements from challenging your brain constantly.
Obviously, if you know these words, you’d probably find yourself using them too. But I don’t think that’s why we learn new words, and we probably find ourselves not using them anyway in spoken conversation, or risk getting odd looks.