Barbara Venkataraman's Blog: A Trip on the Mobius Strip - Posts Tagged "english-language-usage"

Mrs. Grammar Person is pleased to announce that she is having a very good week indeed. Not only is her book "Teatime with Mrs. Grammar Person" coming out in paperback next week, but, in addition, she was featured in not one, not two, but three blogs this week! Check out these fun blogs and don't forget to order your copy of Teatime next week!

Thanks, Sally!

https://smorgasbordinvitation.wordpre...

Thanks, Bee!

https://beehalton.com/2016/06/09/the-...

Thanks, Annie!

http://www.editingpen.net/adverbs/

Can you guess how many words there are in the English language? I bet you can’t.

According to the Global Language Monitor, the number of words in the English Language is 1,025,109. Even more surprising, a new word is created every 98 minutes for an average of 14.7 words per day. The average English-speaking adult has a vocabulary of about 20,000-30,000 words. For myself, as an attorney, writer, English major and geeky logophile, I like to think I'm above average but, too often, I find I'm at a loss for words. Not technical terms or high-brow concepts, but plain old words. I could blame my age (I just turned 55) or I could blame my iPhone (where Siri is at my beck and call to answer any silly question, day or night), or I could blame myself for not trying hard enough. A myriad of concepts, movies, books, and people have decided my brain was too darn crowded, so they hit the road leaving me with my only two vague and useless phrases: That…thing, you know what I mean and that…guy, you remember him…

I believe the true culprit is convenience. For example, I remember every important phone number from my childhood, including my grandparents' number--and they have been gone twenty-five years. Today, the only phone number I am confident I know is my own; every other number is stored on my phone. Here is another example, say I want to know the definition of a word I've typed, I can simply right-click on it. What's more, I can translate it into dozens of languages including Hindi, Swahili and Mandarin. Just now, I right-clicked on the word number and learned that its synonyms are: amount, quantity, sum, figure, numeral, digit, and integer. Sure, I could have come up with those words without a lot of effort, but why would I bother? I have better things to do, even if I can't think of any at the moment…

There is a second culprit I blame for my diminishing vocabulary, for rewriting my life story into a mystery I call "The Case of the Purloined People, Places and Things". Rats, I meant nouns, of course. That culprit is the pictograph, a pictorial symbol for a word or phrase. You know them as emojis. The endless supply of clever emojis has led me to forgo words and replace them with pictures: hearts, fireworks, sad face, mad face, caterpillars--you name it, I've used it. If you think about it, the oldest cave painting in the world is 40,000 years old (pre-dating the oldest known alphabet by 36,000 years) and we have been perfecting spoken and written language ever since. Or so we thought. Given my reliance on emojis to communicate, I realize we have come full circle. Maybe there was nothing to perfect, we had it right from the beginning and all this time we have been chasing our tails. I don't know about you, but I feel so much better knowing that I don't need to scrounge around for the perfect word anymore. A symbol works just fine :-D

Care for a spot of tea with your grammar? Download my humorous grammar book, "Teatime with Mrs. Grammar Person", free on Kindle through January 1st. :-)

Fear not, Gentle Writer, Mrs. Grammar Person is here and she has the answers to all of the questions you never thought to ask. As a dedicated and serious grammarian, she will do what it takes to be entertaining and enlightening, but never vulgar or coarse. Heavens, no! Where are her smelling salts? Warm and witty, Mrs. G.P. makes grammar interesting with rhyming, wishful thinking, story-telling and a champagne toast. You are cordially invited to join her for a spot of tea!


https://www.amazon.com/Teatime-Gramma...