Vocabularies

How impor­tant is the size of your vocab­u­lary? To many, it is the chief indi­ca­tor of your intel­li­gence and your social stand­ing. Use the word “ain’t” or swear casu­ally and you might be thought of as lower class and une­d­u­cated. Fill your con­ver­sa­tions with buzz words and dropped names and peo­ple may think you a effete yup­pie. Load your speech with slang and the word “like” and peo­ple are apt to think you’re an igno­rant teenager.

Vocabulary is the sub­ject of a new British study out of Lancaster University. According to researcher Tony McEnery, teens in the UK have smaller vocab­u­lar­ies thanks to devices like the iPod. The rea­son, McEnery says, is that teens spend more time in a pas­sive, receiv­ing mode when they have their head­phones on, rather than inter­act­ing with other peo­ple and pick­ing up new words.

A third of teenage vocab­u­lary is made up of words like “yeah,” “no,” and “but,” the study finds. McEnery says that this sit­u­a­tion can be cor­rected by bring­ing speech and rhetoric back into the classroom.

For all its attempts at sci­en­tific dis­in­ter­est, McEnery’s study priv­i­leges peo­ple with larger vocab­u­lar­ies. Would the sit­u­a­tion need to be cor­rected if it weren’t wrong?

Yet there are those who do not believe that vocab­u­lary has that much to do with intel­li­gence. Geoffrey Nunberg dis­cussed vocab­u­lar­ies in a 2002 arti­cle, address­ing a gov­ern­ment claim that lower class chil­dren devel­oped sig­nif­i­cantly smaller vocab­u­lar­ies than their mid­dle class counterparts.

Nunberg thought too much empha­sis was placed on vocab­u­lary size. He wrote that “both edu­cated and une­d­u­cated peo­ple turn out to have vocab­u­lar­ies that are per­fectly ade­quate to cope with the moral and mechan­i­cal com­plex­i­ties of daily life.” In seems no mat­ter how quan­tifi­ably large a person’s vocab­u­lary, it is likely large enough to get them by.

“Getting by” may be the very thing that researchers like McEnery are afraid of. Subsistence is not improve­ment, and for those who believe that life must be a con­stance progress from one point to a bet­ter point, mul­ti­ple intelligences–the idea that peo­ple can be smart in a vari­ety of ways–is unac­cept­able. These are the same peo­ple who believe in main­tain­ing a so-called “stan­dard of liv­ing,” an idea only serves to impose a wealth­ier “stan­dard” on other people’s lives.

I don’t mean to break down into a post-colonialist rant here, but it is hard to sep­a­rate lan­guage from pol­i­tics, and it is espe­cially hard to accept the idea that progress is par. Progress is rel­a­tive, a relic of the 1800s and the Industrial Revolution. It is the kind of atti­tude that rein­forces the divide between the haves and have-nots.

When we start count­ing things that don’t mat­ter to us per­son­ally, we become anx­ious about that num­ber and overem­pha­size it. Worrying about vocab­u­lary sizes is one such situation.

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