My 8-year-old doesn’t know “encumber, impale and tirade” but she knows the rest. Plus, “surreptitiously” and “preposterous.” She wouldn’t mix up “incidentally” and “accidentally.” Or “sarcastically” and “ironically.”
Because I actually speak like that.
I’m so weird.
Only 20%? Really? Were they testing ESL students?
This explains so much. Worrisome, also.
People I know casually often think my 5yo is nonverbal. He clams up around people he’s not sure about. When he finally gets to know people, decides they are friends, the floodgates open, words just pour out of him… and they get this funny, stunned look while their brains adjust from “poor sweet kid is mentally challenged” to “OMG what did I just hear?” Right up until that point he was a preternaturally quiet kid hauling plush bunnies around church.
He’s fond of electronic/mechanical/vehicle terms that his brothers use: levers, pistons, axles, capacitors, dirigibles, combine harvesters… loves to throw in the occasional five-dollar word, though being five, he hasn’t always got the shades of meaning correct. This week it was “extensive”. He knows it means something like “a large amount”– but gets it just shy of the target: “It can hold a pretty extensive amount of weight.” So close. We passed an Assembly of God church recently, and he demanded we read him the sign. He thought about it and asked: “Is that where they put together God?” Nice try, kid. We discussed that one after we stopped laughing, and now if you ask him what “Assembly” means he’ll tell you it’s when you get people together. And also it’s when you build robots from a kit.
But the thing is, we only notice it when he gets it not-quite-right because it’s funny. The kids talk the way we do. It’s still a wee bit startling when other people meet our kids and have that weird wide-eyed reaction, like “Wow, you know a lot of big words!” But I can’t hear what they’re hearing. I only notice it when my kid asks me: “Is that light candescent or incandescent?”
The figure is dated 1972. I wonder to what extent this is reflective of word usage patterns changing over time. “Tirade”, in particular, I would have thought is a highly recognizable word nowadays.
Like methylethyl, it also occurred to me to wonder to what extent ESL was a factor (though I expect the prevalence of ESL to be lower in 1972 than today).
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Nah, “tirade” has effectively been replaced by “rant” nowadays.
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There’s a second chart in the following tweet demonstrating how far knowledge of words like this had fallen, and that one at least is based on US born adults. It’s not ESL.
I don’t think it’s IQ either though, I think it’s education. As far as formal education goes, standards are constantly falling. It’s easy to see at the upper tier (Latin is optional nowadays, for example) and it trickles down. But even more importantly, fewer people are reading serious books, voluntarily or involuntarily, and the average book is written at a much lower reading level than a similar book would’ve been written at 50 years ago. If someone only reads popular books written within the past 10 years I actually wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t encounter these words.
It’s shocking to me but not surprising. My friend taught younger children (I believe middle school or high school age), and they often struggled with “older” books (from the 1950s.) Often he couldn’t even figure out how to simplify and explain whatever was giving them trouble because it already seemed so simple and obvious to him.
All of that. The poverty of language in everything on TV… extends seamlessly to mass-market books.
Please don’t stop reviewing books. It’s almost the only way I am reading fiction anymore. Dipping into the mass-market pool has been so disappointing, that my reading stack is all… history, theology, and schoolbooks I need to go over before my kids read them.
…though if I could recommend one book from that current stack to all and sundry, it’d be Fabre’s *Life of the Spider*. We have barely started on it, and it’s one of the greatest read-alouds I’ve ever done with the kids. The language is archaic, the subject matter described lovingly in morbid and grisly detail, it’d never get past the cruelty-to-animals people in a modern classroom, and my children are transfixed by it. Cannot wait to get back to the spiders. If they had read this book to us in elementary school, half the class would’ve gone into entomology.
It’s not great literature, but we’re also reading Falcons of France (a novel about the French Foreign Legion in WWI) right now, and the boyos are eating it up– I found it fun too. We are looking up all the airplane models mentioned, and mapping all the places in the story. Spad, Rumpler, Nieuport, and Boche have I think become permanent parts of our vocabulary now. I’m not sure how much of the geography will stick, but at the very least they’ll probably remember where Paris, Verdun, and Rheims are.
We haven’t done Birth of Britain– I’ll have to look that one up– but we’ve read through Our Island Story. My husband cringes a bit at the inclusion of mythology with the history without any caveats, but… eh. I don’t think it hurts.
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This is one reason we populate our home bookshelves with “older” books. Say what you will about the florid prose in Howard Pyle’s iteration of Robin Hood… If you can wade through that at eight, the world of literature is yours for the taking. Plus the illustrations are great 🙂 Even the Tom Swift books, laughable mass-market glurge in their own day, are literate compared to most of what’s out there now.
You know when I was growing up I heard the phrase knowledge is power, and I internalized that to mean the person with the most power is the one with the largest personal library and biggest archive (archive in this case being a mix of artifacts and old primary source documents.)
Nowadays, while I don’t think the saying was meant to be taken literally. It does seem to be roughly where we are in present day. As most of the books kids see these days are less of older proven books and more of the filled with nothing but lies and propaganda books.
I am raising my kids for world domination!
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While I agree that vocabulary is gone downhill rather drastically. I don’t think the list provided was quite accurate. In particular I refer to Numbers 37 and 38 which the list states only 19% and 13% recognized.
I know this is off as number 37 at 19% is the word Encumber and it is the main part of the phrase “over-encumbered” which almost everyone who has ever played a video game recognizes as being highly troublesome.
Number 38 which is 13% I also can’t believe is accurate as I had teachers spend close to 15 years hammering at us that plagiarism is bad and that if you get caught plagiarizing a paper that you would be suspended or expelled.
It is rather obvious we no longer command the same level of speaking as we did in previous eras. One simply has to look at the speeches given in the 1930s to 1940s to realize our vocabulary is badly lacking. Now granted this was politicians and a certain Austrian Painter speaking to rallies and crowds, but you need to recall they were speaking on the level the people they spoke to would understand.
Something interesting that was pointed out about this was the references that were often made pointed back to Greek and Roman histories and mythologies, as well as a very firm basis of Biblical knowledge. If the people they were speaking to were not educated in these subjects the speeches in question would have been tuned out or ignored which presents that most folks had at least some basis of education in the subjects at hand and could clearly and concisely understand the vocabulary used.
Almost all of which is lacking today, for a series of various reasons I have no wish to get into at the moment.
Our informally adopted children learned to read from Dr. Seuss books, happily singing and printing, “Green eggs and ham” before they were even in kindergarden. And it didn’t hurt that they could pick up blue green eggs still warm from the Araucana hens of my friendly neighbor…not that they had the world by the bum with a downhill pull ;-D
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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