Ever thought about the number of words we use?
We all certainly have our favourite ones, whether at work or out with our friends, and there are certain words that just seem to crop up more than others. In my job, it’s all about “leading”, with every technology vendor under the sun “leading” something or another. Begs the question who they are leading, but let’s not dwell on that.
Outside of work, the word that seems to be flavour of the month is “like”. Again, this is used rather carelessly and scattered across everything and anything people are saying. Like what? You may well ask, but you are not going to get very far, as it’s like everything. Glad we cleared that one up.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to profess any kind of exceptional grasp of languages as while I probably know a word or two more than the average Joe Smoe, I only speak English and certainly haven’t swallowed a dictionary. In fact, people like that just annoy me and I couldn’t help but feel the arrogance pouring out of this piece in the Guardian.
Anyway, I digress. To the original point, there are actually almost 1 million words in the English language – the good people at Language Monitor are actually counting down to the one millionth one – which is far more than any other language on earth.
But how many of these are actually used? I did a little couch-based investigation and came across this site, which states that an average educated person knows about 20,000 words and uses about 2,000 of them a week. Not bad, but seems only the tip of the iceberg and makes me wonder how this compares to the “non” average. Well, good old Mr Shakespeare used 24,000 words, which considering the number of new words since then; isn’t too shabby. On the other side of the scales is Basic English, a made up language that maybe a few too many people subscribe to, consisting of only 850 words.
Now, there isn’t going to be any great epiphany here as ultimately, it is what it is, but next time someone keeps abusing the same word over and over again, like Hillary among others did recently in Iowa (if you missed it, check this out), this might make you smile as you think just how many other words there are to chose from.
