Words

Inexact vocabularians have reckoned the average intelligent adult's vocabulary at about 15,000 words. Recently, however, Northwestern University's Psychology Professor Robert Holmes Seashore* devised a scientific test to determine the total number of English words a person would recognize. It is a multiple-choice examination using sample lists of "basic" and "derived" words from Funk & Wagnails' unabridged dictionary, which lists 450,000 words in all. Dr. Seashore's test includes common words as well as puzzlers like antisialogogue (an agent preventing the flow of saliva). Last week he reported the surprising discovery that the average college student has a recognition vocabulary of 176,000 words--62,000 "basic" and 114,000 "derived."

An individual has 1) a "recognition," 2) a "possible" use (8% smaller than "recognition") and 3) an "actual" use vocabulary. No accurate tests have been made of the "actual use" vocabulary, but a professional writer who went through Dr. Seashore's test marking words he had used in, speech and writing claimed a working vocabulary of 40,000 basic and 40,000 derived words, a "possible use" vocabulary of 225,000.

Boners. Other word news of the week: New York City's Board of Examiners exhibited a list of boners by college-graduated candidates who were asked to illustrate the meaning of certain words in examinations for teaching licenses:

P:"How venial, how delectable is the grape!"

P:"Indigent matter cannot be eaten without serious consequences."

P:"A martinet sat on the highest branch of the tree."

P:"She was freed by the gangster because she was a captious blond."

P:"The dead man had wished to be cremated, and the increment scattered to the winds."

P:"The perfunctory organs are a great help to man."

P:"Don't be so redolent, say it."

P:"Having laid the oranges in a row, he proceeded to excoriate their skins one by one."

Builder. Psychologist Johnson O'Connor, who started with astronomical and mathematical research and was a metallurgist before he became interested in industrial personnel problems, is director of the "Human Engineering Laboratory" in Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken. N. J. From testing 20,000 students, businessmen, professional workers, people in all walks of life, he has concluded that "an extensive knowledge of the exact meanings of English words accompanies outstanding success in this country more often than any other single characteristic which the Human Engineering Laboratory has been able to isolate and measure." His laboratory has just published the Johnson O'Connor English Vocabulary Builder.

Vocabularian O'Connor says he has discovered three Laws of Learning Vocabulary: 1) The dictionary's words can be grouped according to a universal order of progressive unfamiliarity. 2) In this grouping there is a dividing line of difficulty for each individual, who knows most of the words below it, very few above it. 3) An individual learns most easily those words just beyond the boundary of his vocabulary. According to Mr. O'Connor people can learn new words just as well by studying a list as by reading. So he has arranged 1,118 words in the order of their familiarity, instructs his readers to turn to the page where words became unfamiliar and start studying from there.

First on his list, known to all adults he tested, are horseshoer, soak, postpone, law, secret, untidy. Unknown to 50% are such words as chaste, rectitude, elegiacal, ameliorate, jocose, candor. At the end of Mr. O'Connor's list, unknown to 99% of adults, are enervate, unmitigated, virulent, ingenuous, quixotic, plethora, unconscionable, ascetic, quizzical, jejune, utter (verb), anfractuous, unwonted, detraction, tenuous, inchoate, collate. Collate, last word in the book, was defined by 69% of college seniors as "to classify,'' but it means "to compare writings critically." Length of a word is no indication of its difficulty. Commonest error is confusion of words with their opposites. Thus neat is the commonest misconception of untidy, and 52% of Mr. O'Connor's subjects thought enervating meant invigorating. But they were on the verge of knowing the word because they had placed it in the correct environment.

Mr. O'Connor's rankings make some of the New York teaching candidates' errors less surprising. The meaning of martinet is unknown to 65% of adults, of redolent to 82% and of captious to 86%.

Ballyhooer. Now available is a new pulp magazine. Better English, to improve vocabularies. Its editor and publisher is Austrian-born Dr. Dagobert D. Runes, 36, onetime member of the executive committee of the Austrian Syndicalist Party, now about to recant in a forthcoming book to be called The Twilight of Marxism. Short, blond Dr. Runes in 1932 threw his considerable energies into education of U. S. adults, was director of the late Institute of Advanced Education in Manhattan, has started some 20 magazines, including The Modern Thinker. Among contributors to his Better Speech are Sinclair Lewis, Dale Carnegie, Frank H. Vizetelly. Sample subjects: Anybody Can Become a Writer, Know the Word That Clicks, How to Make Her Say "Yes." In the first issue last month Professor Janet R. Aiken exposed boners (such as "like I am") allegedly made by President Roosevelt, in his Western speech-making tour last fall. In the January issue Dr. Runes demands that Will Hays clean up the "moronic vulgarisms.'' the "cliches" and the "tawdry or meretricious speech" in the cinema, calls on U. S. citizens to boycott "those films that pollute our heritage of good English." To determine what films should be boycotted, it remains only for Dr. Runes' experts to agree, if they can, on what is good English.

*Son of University of Iowa's retired Professor Carl E. Seashore, famed musical aptitude tester.

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