Have you ever been at a “loss for words”? It seems like everybody has been at one time or another. One of the deceptive gymnastics that politicians practice is to say something, anything when they are unable to think of an acceptable answer to an embarrassing question.
Anybody who has worked on an ambulance can tell you that there are people out there who are always at a loss for words, primarily because they don’t know very many in the first place. A severely restricted vocabulary prevents them from communicating vital information to the people who are there to help them.
Possessing a full, well-rounded vocabulary not only gives you the means to express yourself adequately, but also expands your enjoyment of life itself by being able to understand other people better. But how many words are there, and how many are you expected to know?
Estimating the number of words in the English language is an occupation in itself that leads to controversy. After all, just what is a “word” in the first place? “Climb” is a word, but what about its derivatives such as climber, climbing, climbed? How about the individual names for 1 million insect species? Or the nearly 2 million chemicals? See what I mean?
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Leaving out the derivatives, the Oxford English Dictionary contains full entries for just over 170,000 words that are in current usage. It has been estimated that the average 16-yr.-old has a vocabulary of 10,000 to 12,000 words and that a college graduate can be expected to possess a 25,000 to 30,000 word vocabulary.
But anybody who works in fire or EMS training knows from observation that this is dropping. With this ongoing collapse of the public education system, adolescents are being sent out into the world without basic skills. Many of them cannot figure out friction loss, or how to calculate dosages. A lot of them cannot read a map, let alone follow directions. Trying to explain the half-life of a radioactive substance to someone who has never learned the difference between a molecule and an element is frustrating, to say the least.
And while the school boards are busy trying to figure out when to begin their next 2-week paid vacation, the children are being short-changed on their vocabulary skills also. You’ve probably seen these new puzzles in the newspapers that are supplanting the crossword puzzles. They are called soduku, or something like that. It’s a kind of number puzzle. Do you wonder why they are suddenly becoming so popular? Simple. Today’s high school graduates are so deficient in their vocabularies that they cannot complete or enjoy doing a standard crossword. They don’t know the words. But there are only 10 digits to learn, so let’s do number puzzles, instead.
Better yet….let’s get this equipment checked out. I need to get the coffee going.
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