Verbicide
He entered my office for advice as a freshman advisee sporting nearly perfect SAT scores and an impeccable academic record—by all accounts a young man of considerable promise. During a 20-minute conversation about his academic future, however, he displayed a vocabulary that consisted mostly of two words: “cool” and “really.” Almost 800 SAT points hitched to each word. To be fair, he could use them interchangeably as “really cool” or “cool . . . really!” He could also use them singly, presumably for emphasis. When he became one of my students in a subsequent class I confirmed that my first impression of the young scholar was largely accurate and that his vocabulary, and presumably his mind, consisted predominantly of words and images derived from overexposure to television and the new jargon of computer- speak. He is no aberration, but an example of a larger problem, not of illiteracy but of diminished literacy in a culture that often sees little reason to use words carefully, however abundantly. Increasingly, student papers, from otherwise very good students, have whole paragraphs that sound like advertising copy. Whether students are talking or writing, a growing number have a tenuous grasp on a declining vocabulary. Excise “uh . . . like . . . uh” from virtually any teenage conversation, and the effect is like sticking a pin into a balloon. In the past 50 years, by one reckoning, the working vocabulary of the average 14-year-old has declined from some 25,000 words to 10,000 words (“Harper’s Index” 2000). This reflects not merely a decline in numbers of words but in the capacity to think. It also reflects a steep decline in the number of things that an adolescent needs to know and to name in order to get by in an increasingly homogenized and urbanized consumer society. This is a national tragedy virtually unnoticed in the media. It is no mere coincidence that in roughly the same half century the average person has learned to recognize more than 1,000 corporate logos but can recognize fewer than 10 plants and animals native to their locality (Hawken 1993, 214).