The shrinking, post-human vocabulary of our tone-deaf culture

I’ve become interested over the past couple of years in my students’ shrinking vocabularies. It’s just anecdotal, but I fancy that I’ve seen an incredible and radical shrinking up of my students’ words. When I began teaching college students 15 years ago, my students—rightly or wrongly—were embarrassed when they didn’t know a word or couldn’t pronounce it. Of late, though, many of my students don’t even feel the need to feign an understanding of “big” words: lustrous, translucent, pusillanimous. I’ve been keeping a list. I’ve seen numbers used online that say that the average vocabulary of a teenager in the 1950’s was 25,000, whereas now, it’s 12,000. Another report says—and this was a decade ago!—that a the average teenagers’ active vocabulary is down to just 800 words a day.1

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