The decline of voc... vacob ... vocub ... using words!
Did you ever see the movie Idiocracy? If not, don't bother. I can tell you the interesting part here, and the rest is pretty damn stupid. It's the premise that each generation is getting a little bit more stupid, and if you took a dumb guy from the present and sent him 200 years into the future, he'd be a genius. Every day I've gone to work recently, I've thought about this movie. I am constantly amazed at the words my students simply don't know. It's not that they just won't answer questions ... they guess, and get it wrong. Their level of vocabulary is stunningly limited. I've modified my teaching technique to include segments that I thought would only ever belong in the ESL classroom to check that the students actually know the words in front of them. I've been reading some classic sci-fi novels from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Without exception, they're clearly written for the adolescent male. (Maybe that says something about me, that I still enjoy them?) I compare the words used in these novels with the words my students know, and I can't help feeling shocked. The other thing that brings it home is that I usually have one or two older students who have retired and returned to college. I can almost always rely on them to know the words. How can you do anything if you don't have a command of your native tongue? Yet somehow or other these students have been allowed to get through high school without even learning the meanings of slightly higher level words.
I teach EFL in Asia and had a brief return to college near the end of the last millenium. Not that I consider myself the god Lexis, but I was surprised at how people say 15 years younger were dumbed down. If only I could time travel to compare my own college days with those some years later. I think the decay would be visible.
One joy of Project Gutenberg and DWEM classics is the challenge of vocabularly. In reading great works, one's vocabulary develops: prose uses more low-frequency words than conversation. In a society that ignores crafted prose, low-frequency words shrivel up and die.
But then I'm a crank annoyed by the proliferation of the new plural: 's.
Comment by Roger Godby — March 28, 2009 @ 4:29 am
I think that you've hit the nail on the head (at least in part). I'm sure that a large part of the reason for the decline in vocab is the fact that so many of them simply don't read. They don't read for pleasure, and they don't read the work assigned, and on the odd occasion when they do get forced to read, it's such an alien experience that they're completely incapable of understanding anything more than the surface meaning (if even that).
Comment by FSN9 — March 28, 2009 @ 5:38 am