Bronte Follower: Blog

When writing Chapter 94, I managed to forget that there are days on which a certain US holiday CANNOT be. That forced me to make a few changes to the chapter, but nothing at all substantive. I've just uploaded the edited chapter to the queue. The substantive part of all this is that I had to move the nearly completed next day of the diary to three days later, so am only just starting on the new Chapter 95.

Recently, I received a missive from a reader that had apparently read a lot of "Beth" but had ultimately gotten turned off of the story by the girls' vocabulary. Since I write primarily for myself (as I recently responded to another reader), criticism of that sort generally rolls off my back. At the time, I felt no need to respond, so deleted the message.

As I've considered that reader's complaint since receiving it, I've come to the conclusion that I was too hasty in deleting the message, thus having no method to respond directly to that reader. Then, while reading through the comments of one of aroslav's engaging and fun stories, one of his readers commented somewhat negatively on a word choice he had made. Since that... not really a complaint, but that comment was at least tangentially connected to my reader's complaint, I responded in that story's comments. The second paragraph of my response is:

Readers should remember that writers, at least good writers, are not simply listing a series of events, but telling a story, trying to get across the emotions of events, which are often subtly different across scenes. This is among the main reasons to have large working vocabularies, which allow much more nuance than do smaller vocabularies.

I've thought quite a bit about both comments and considered a piece of information that I've "known" for years: Size of working vocabularies for English speakers is on the decline. There also seems to be a decline in English speakers/writers not using the language correctly, that is, not following the written and unwritten rules of English. Of course, that could mostly be an artifact of sampling, as the words and language that speakers/writers use is so much more readily available for critique than even 20 years ago, what with so many online venues for publication, public discourse, and simple comments on YouTube videos and the like. [I have to admit that reading YouTube comments often has me scratching my head, as whatever message was intended did not get through to me due to poor word choice, poor or lacking sentence construction, and a host of other errors of using the English language.]

I have little doubt that the comparisons of vocabulary size across different time periods is frequently flawed, as they may well have compared the vocabularies of published authors of earlier times to those of the general public in current times; see comment in above paragraph. One study that seems to have controlled for that bias is here (https://tinyurl.com/vocab-decline), although only the abstract is available without specific access.

One online resource (https://tinyurl.com/10Kvocabulary) suggests that a 10,000-word vocabulary is a target of erudition or, at least, competence. Personally, I find that disturbing. Relatively early on in "Beth," I ran the entire then-current text through an online word counter, which noted, if I recall correctly, that I had already used in excess of 10,000 different words, and that in less than 15% of the current length of "Beth." Granted, that analysis counted related words -- such as singular and plural constructions (e.g., marble, marbles) and other such similar uses of different numbers, tense, etc. -- as different words. Given that I was not trying to use a large vocabulary -- simply using what I considered to be the best of, often, many options from my active vocabulary (https://tinyurl.com/active-vocab) to say what I wanted to say, that the 10,000-word target noted above seemed fairly pathetic.

Ammon Shea, writing in the New York Times Magazine, presented a particularly compelling essay on vocabulary size, at least as it relates to rarely-used words (https://tinyurl.com/SheaEssay). I agree with his primary point, that building a vocabulary solely to attempt impressing with that vocabulary is not the best reason to have a large vocabulary. I doubt that I would ever use "groak" now that I've learned of the word from Mr. Shea.

In my opinion, an active vocabulary is truly useful for only two things: 1) presenting information or story or whatever in whatever venue to most succinctly and precisely get one's thought across and 2) for thoroughly understanding those thoughts presented by others, either in text -- formally, as in published works, or informally, as in YouTube comments -- or speech. Well, I do have a third reason, and one that may be more important than the first two in some, perhaps many, situations: To sound like one knows what one is talking about. [Sorry. I had to end that sentence with a preposition to avoid sounding too haughty (and that reminds me of the 1-2-3-for joke).]

Sounding like one knows the subject on which one is pontificating [word choice purposeful] is often crucial to being accepted as an authority.

As example, someone presenting data about some phenomenon might say "the number of pregnant teenaged girls was related to education, home life, and how they saw their futures."

Another speaker might say, "the percentage of unwed pregnant teenaged girls rises incrementally in near lockstep with a combination of social factors led by the number of parents in the home, education level, the girl's perception of the value of that education, and the girl's perception of her future."

[Caveat: The above is not taken from any actual study but is just off the top of my head (some might say "from out of my ass"), and I do not intend it as any sort of actual analysis.]

The latter speaker may well be taken as more informed on the subject as s/he sounds more erudite, sounds like s/he knows what s/he is talking about... at least by those not in the vocal minority that is the anti-knowledge, anti-science crowd (at least, I fervently hope it's a minority).

The point is, as I wrote in my response in the comments to "COACH!", the larger one's vocabulary, the more choices one has in word use. The more choices one has, the more-precise, the more-evocative, the more-interesting one's speech and writing can be.

I finished Chapter 94 a few days ago, but I got hung up on Chapter 93, particularly the second soccer game. Since it's been so long since I added a chapter, I figured that I'd go ahead and upload both, particularly as much of my free time for a bit will be spend on some manuscript-review commitments. I'm not sure when I'll be able to get Chapter 95 posted, but It's already well started.

I'll be getting back home tonight from an exhausting two-week work trip to troubleshoot a project. While I had nearly zero time to myself, the ton of OT will be very welcome in my next paycheck. I'll be getting back to the Beth story tonight or tomorrow. Because there will be lots going on for the next few weeks of Beth story time, the other stories within the universe will see a hiatus for a while.

Partly because I often forget some of my characters' names, myself, I began creating a roster. I decided that readers might appreciate it, so I cleaned it up and have popped it into the pub queue.

I've got Chapter 92 mostly written, but it will be a while, yet, until I get it uploaded, both because it's involved and because of new-project workload in my work life.