The last days of long words! The sunset of syntactical surplusage!
In Chicago, in a downtown courtroom, lawyer Edward Greenspan won't let Conrad Black take the stand.
The problem is Mr. Black's fondness for whacking big words: tricoteuses (knitters of yarn, used to describe reporters and gossips, augmented by the adjective "braying"), planturous(fleshy), poltroon (a coward, a.k.a. former Quebec premier Robert Bourassa), spavined (lame), dubiety (doubt: Mr. Black rarely uses a simple word where a splashy lemma will do), gasconading (blustering) and velleities (distant hopes), to list just a few of his verbal smatterings. Mr. Greenspan fears the Lord's lingualism will turn off the jury.
Meanwhile in Toronto, at the Ryerson School of Journalism, Ivor Shapiro is teaching his class to write clearly. The decor is Early Modern Factory — flat window, false ceiling of black metal grille to make the room seem less cavernous, giant TV suspended in a corner like a moody spider.
"One has to tell students in journalism school to express themselves simply, because they have been taught in high school to use big words in an effort to impress their professors," Mr. Shapiro says.
To do this, he has handed out a story called "Dead Reckoning," by journalist Veronica Cusack, an account of an autopsy performed on a 17-year-old boy who committed suicide. The students — and this happens every time, without exception — object to the last paragraph, in which the writer employs the word quiddity.
"'Why would she use a big word when she could use "essence?" ' they ask," Mr. Shapiro says. "So there is something about a $10 word that calls out to them. I feel, myself, really caught. If she makes you go and use a dictionary because you didn't know the word, is that really so terrible a thing?"
These days, apparently, it is. A number of people are getting alarmed. And this isn't just a minor trend, or a sentimental longing for long-worded days of yore. It turns out that having a good vocabulary is shatteringly important.
It's fairly easy to teach our little geniuses to read. But how well they understand, and how much they learn for the rest of their lives, depends directly on how many words they acquire before they turn 18.
Which is a gargantuan (adj. enormous, gigantic) problem. "While North American teachers have become more effective at teaching students to read words, we have virtually ignored the impact of teaching students to understand words, especially in the primary grades," is the conclusion reached in a new and frighteningly comprehensive study by Andrew Biemiller, a professor at the University of Toronto.
This is the revenge of the Flashcard parents. If Little Princess is an average child, she'll know 6,000 root-word meanings by the end of Grade 2. That's okay, but nothing special: At that point, the top 25 per cent of children already know twice as many words as the lowest 25 per cent, and the gap grows exponentially. Roughly 35,000 more words get stuffed into Little Princess's average head by the time she leaves high school.
But by then the foundation of her so-called mind has hardened. Limited by early lexical laxity, the average North American adult knows only 30,000 to 60,000 words, out of a potential "working vocabulary" of 700,000. If only Little Princess had learned more words earlier! If only you were a better parent!
Children who live in "advantaged" homes — where new words are considered important and bandied about — hear three times as many words as kids who don't. And those who don't are at "considerable risk of continued low achievement," Prof. Biemiller says.
You don't need a vocabulary to see the point: A home, a city or a society where people appreciate and share their vocabularies, where they take public pleasure in using language, is a place with a future where the lights are on.
