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Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your ability to form coherent and compelling arguments. I'd argue that without an expansive vocabulary you

Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your ability to form coherent and compelling arguments. I'd argue that without an expansive vocabulary you would struggle to write with precision let alone brevity. Not that its wrong to question, I just think you'd need to do more work supporting the idea that language skills are less important today for some reason.

dist1ll 4y ago
> Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your ability to form coherent and compelling arguments There is even more to it. Language can influence (prev.: limits) your thinking and ability to categorize. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity (Removed misleading reference)
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Isn't this Sapir-Whorf, which has been disproven? At least the last time I read of it in relation to 1984.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dist1ll 4y ago
    Yup, linguistic determinism is nonsense, thanks for pointing that out. I edited my comment.
jjk166 4y ago
Using a rare word with a marginally different meaning to convey an idea more precisely and concisely depends on the person on the other end of the conversation knowing that word and the marginal difference in meaning it conveys. The moment you can't trust people to distinguish between two synonyms, one of them becomes useless. As we communicate with wider groups whom we have less familiarity with, the amount you can trust nuance to be conveyed decreases. And logically as already rare words become more rarely used, the likelihood that your audience is familiar with them further decreases. Someone who focuses on clearly explaining thoughts using small numbers of commonly understood words will be much better at forming coherent and compelling arguments than someone who instead invests the same resources in learning a vast but useless vocabulary.

dist1ll 4y ago

> Your vocabulary is tied to your expressive power and your ability to form coherent and compelling arguments There is even more to it. Language can influence (prev.: limits) your thinking and ability to categorize. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity (Removed misleading reference)

Apocryphon 4y ago
Isn't this Sapir-Whorf, which has been disproven? At least the last time I read of it in relation to 1984.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dist1ll 4y ago
  Yup, linguistic determinism is nonsense, thanks for pointing that out. I edited my comment.

jjk166 4y ago

Using a rare word with a marginally different meaning to convey an idea more precisely and concisely depends on the person on the other end of the conversation knowing that word and the marginal difference in meaning it conveys. The moment you can't trust people to distinguish between two synonyms, one of them becomes useless. As we communicate with wider groups whom we have less familiarity with, the amount you can trust nuance to be conveyed decreases. And logically as already rare words become more rarely used, the likelihood that your audience is familiar with them further decreases. Someone who focuses on clearly explaining thoughts using small numbers of commonly understood words will be much better at forming coherent and compelling arguments than someone who instead invests the same resources in learning a vast but useless vocabulary.