I agree with the article that it does limit your vocabulary. For example, writers (and comedians) play with words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Playing wi

I agree with the article that it does limit your vocabulary. For example, writers (and comedians) play with words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Playing with paragraphs is a lot harder than playing with words. If you take the word and leave only an "equivalent" sentence or paragraph in the toolbox, the experience that can be created with that alone, changes. There tends to be lot more mental fatigue involved in parsing sentences than there is in picking up a similar meaning from a familiar word. That process of passing meaning from one party to another is what defines an experience. If you miss a joke and someone explains it to you, you may "get it" and at that point understand as it well as the person who "got it" immediately but you would have had totally different experiences. This topic is related to the question "whether there are prohibitively unthinkable thoughts given a vocabulary". The answer to that is generally shown in no uncertain terms be a strong YES.