The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate (2 page)

“Dr. von Braun,” the woman gushed, “I just loved your speech, and I found it of absolutely infinitesimal value!”

“Well then,” von Braun gulped, “I guess I'll have to publish the text posthumously.”

“Oh yes!” the woman came right back. “And the sooner the better!”

Now there was someone who needed to gain greater control over her word choices. But, given the power that words confer on our lives, don't we all wish to acquire a richer vocabulary? Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once declared, “Language is the skin of living thought.” Just as your skin encloses your body, so does your vocabulary bound your mental life.

It's a matter of simple mathematics: The more words you know, the more choices you can make; the more choices you can make, the more accurate, vivid, and varied your speaking and writing will be. “All words,” observed Henry Ward Beecher, “are pegs to hang ideas on.” Other things being equal, the larger your stock of word pegs, the closer you will come to finding the exact word that fits precisely the thought you want to express in speech or writing.

Ever since Adam assigned names to all the animals, we human beings have managed to come up with labels for almost everything on this planet—and beyond. The more of these names you acquire (and all of the italicized words that follow repose in this book), the more concise will be your expression. Why should you wheeze through a dozen words—“the act of throwing a thing or person out of a window”—when you can capture the act in a single noun:
defenestration
? Why scrawl out “a place real or imaginary where living conditions are considered to be as bad as possible,” when you can capture the concept with eight little letters:
dystopia
? Wouldn't it be convenient if our language possessed a
discrete
and
discreet
word to denote the excessive development of fat on the buttocks? It does:
steatopygia
. Doesn't your heart leap up when it beholds the
effulgent
word
lambent
, at your service to describe the soft radiance of light or flame playing on a surface?

English is the most cheerfully democratic and hospitable language in the history of humankind. English has acquired the most abundant of all word stocks—616,500 entries officially enshrined in the Oxford English Dictionary, our fattest unabridged lexicon. That's an extraordinary number, considering that German owns about 185,000, so our English language boasts almost four times the number of words as the second-place language. Then come Russian at 130,000 and French at 100,000.

While there are more English words, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, relatively few are in actual circulation. The average English speaker possesses a vocabulary of 10,000 to 20,000 words but actively uses only a small fraction, the others being recognition or recall vocabulary. A literate adult may recognize 60,000 or more words, the most learned among us 100,000. Just as we human beings use only one-tenth of our brain power, the most articulate verbivore interacts with only one-sixth of our English word hoard and actually employs only one-sixth of that.

Sadly then, many of us miss out on the sheer euphony and sesquipedalian playfulness of thousands of English words. Simply read aloud and listen to the tintinnabulation of the more ear-rinsing entries you are about to encounter:
absquatulate, anthrophagous, bumptious, concatenation, crapulous, dipsomaniac, eleemosynary, gallimaufry, glossolalia, ineluctable, legerdemain, lubricious, nugatory, peccadillo, persiflage, pinguid, plangent, pusillanimous, redolent, soporific, ululate
.

One of the happiest features of possessing a capacious vocabulary is the opportunity to insult your enemies with impunity. While the madding crowd gets mad with exhausted epithets such as “You rotten pig” and “You dirty bum,” you can
acerbate, deprecate, derogate
, and
excoriate
your
nemesis
with a battalion of laser-precise
pejoratives
. You can brand him or her a
grandiloquent popinjay, venal pettifogger, nefarious miscreant, flagitious recidivist, sententious blatherskite, mawkish ditherer, arrant peculator, irascible misanthrope, hubristic narcissist, feckless sycophant, vituperative virago, vapid yahoo, eructative panjandrum, saturnine misanthrope, antediluvian troglodyte, maudlin poetaster, splenetic termagant, pernicious quidnunc, rancorous anchorite, perfidious mountebank
, or
irascible curmudgeon
.

When you were a child learning to speak, you seized each new word as if it were a shiny toy. This is how you learned your language, and this is how you can expand your vocabulary. As you keep company and build friendships with the words in
The Highly Selective Dictionary
, start using them in conversation. Encourage your children to be
beneficent
and
empathic
in their relationships. Explain to Tabby that she shouldn't be so
obdurate
about trying the latest feline cuisine. Remind yourself what an
exemplary nonpareil, indefatigable autodidact
, and
benignant thaumaturge
you are for expanding your word hoard so
perspicaciously
. Make vocabulary growth a lifelong pursuit. In the process, you will expand your thoughts and your feelings, your speaking, your reading, and your writing—everything that makes up you.

R
ICHARD
L
EDERER
,
author of
Fractured English