- An extensive vocabulary aids expressions and communication.
- Vocabulary size has been directly linked to reading comprehension.
- A person may be judged by others based on his or her vocabulary.
None of these seem very convincing. (The second, I suspect, is more correlation than causation.)
The fourth reason, however, gave me pause:
- Linguistic vocabulary is synonymous with thinking vocabulary.
The more words you know, the better able you will be to communicate experiences to others and to yourself. The more words you know, the deeper your understanding of the world around you.
A simple point, maybe, but an important one.
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I happened upon this quote tonight while reading Jonathan Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis:
Controlled processing requires language. You can have bits and pieces of thought through images, but to plan something complex, to weigh the pros and cons of different paths, or to analyze the causes of past successes and failures, you need words.
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Part of a quote I posted earlier from Buckminster Fuller:
All the words in all dictionaries
Are the consequent tools
Of all men's conscious
And conscientious attempts
To communicate
All their experiences—
Which is of course
To communicate
Universe.
There are forty-three thousand current words
In the Concise Oxford Dictionary.
We don't know who invented them!
What an enormous, anonymous inheritance!
Shakespeare used ten thousand of them
With which to formulate
His complete "works."
It would take many more volumes
Than Shakepeare's to employ
The forty-three thousand—
Logically and cogently.
Words are tools to communicate and organize experiences. I would be surprised if Scott Adams' hypothesis for how the brain stores words was not confirmed by neuroscience.
