If we're counting distinctly spelled words then we're including not only do/does/did/done but want/wants/wanted and dog/dogs/dog's/dogs'. We can't know what the people who made up your Victorian Era vocabulary test were thinking, but I think it's most likely that they had no intention of counting inflected forms. If we count them because they are "distinctly spelled" then suddenly we're all up in the 60K+ range. I did not mean to imply that when I developed my scale, but perhaps that's the professional standard so I should have. It certainly rescues my calibrations!
My impression is that do/want/dog would be counted
as one word each in professional vocabulary size evaluation.
It has validity at the bottom of the scale. For quite a while, when you're first learning a language, inflected forms are just as much work as the basic form. But this would make it difficult to compare fluency in a heavily inflected language like Spanish with a lightly inflected language like English or with an inflection-free language like Chinese.
I don't know about inflection, but Chinese has at least four tones.
Just pick a hundred words at random and look up their etymologies. I'll get around to it, but not soon.
Such information must be available without having to go to so much trouble.
If it shows up in
the funnies it must be more widely known than that.
No way of telling other than by a survey/test.
Crappy metaphor, you could write Obama's speeches. Everyone agrees on what a rotten egg is. We don't all agree on what's great literature. Virtually everyone can smell the rot in an egg.
I accept that the metaphor may be too inexact to get
my point across. It was was meant as an allusion to the
fact that anyone can tell Joyce's writing stinks.
The problem is that there is a tiny academic cottage industry
which has been trying to tell us for 90 years that there is some
merit to his jibberish, and thay they are the only people wise
enough to recognize it.
Millions of people, like yours truly, can't understand highbrow literature well enough to distinguish great from sophomoric, and those who can don't always agree.
I think you probably underestimate yourself, and I have no doubt
about my own ability to tell good writing from bad writing.
So why should we take your word that the entire literary community is wrong about Joyce? This sounds an awful lot like a situation we encounter on SciForums rather often: the precocious teenager with two semesters of college physics telling us that he's found a flaw in the Theory of Relativity. The difference is that the scientific method can be used to test his hypothesis.
Also, I seriously doubt that the entire literary community is
on board in favor of Joyce. If they are so much the worse
for them.
We can't test your hypothesis so easily, but we can at least ask you to elaborate on your reasons for dismissing Joyce as well as your own rebuttals to the literary community's praise for his work.
Put simply Joyce is boring. Besides that he is deliberately
obscure, with no redeeming feature in the form of lofty
or stirring language.
For example in contrast, Blake's poem
The Tyger contains
passages as as obscure (in bold red) as anything in Joyce:
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
Now, most of us have no idea what is it for a Tiger
to aspire to wings, or for a star to throw down a spear
and weep, yet the expression is so penetrating that
one read is enough for many of us to remember it forever.
Hence the poem is one of the best-known works in
English Literature.
I learned that word in 1959 in my second-year Spanish class. We had just been taught the Spanish word limosnero for "beggar." Someone asked the origin of this odd word and apparently the teacher had been asked this before, because she explained that it came, via the same path through Latin, from the same Greek word as English "eleemosynary."
I first encountered it in about 1972-73 in John Fowles' novel
The French Lieutenant's Woman.
Do I get a million bucks from you too,
No.
to add to the million James owes me for "plantigrade?"
Good luck.
Apparently not in my case unless we've agreed to count inflected forms.
Right.
Hmm. By putting my knowledge in a favorable light you managed at the same time to accuse me of misusing a word that is common among scientists and engineers. A backhanded compliment for sure.
I did not exactly accuse you of misusing a word, I thought
you meant to use a different word.
I'm as capable of modesty as the next person.Yes, we should definitely avoid using obscure five-syllable words whenever possible. Glad to see you have a sense of humor.
I have a slight tendency toward bravado. Very slight.
"Parsimonious" is funny? Not all 5-syllable words are bad,
and "Parsimonious" is one of the good ones.
