Off-Topic: Word Play

Periodically I mention the extremely popular online vocabulary challenge A.Word.A.Day, written by American author and speaker Anu Garg.  Today:

The English language has lots of words. More than half a million by one count.  It’s just that many of them are not widely known. It’s a catch-22. You avoid using unusual words because you fear that others may not know them. And people do not know those words because they haven’t come across them.  In this week’s A.Word.A.Day we do our part to get rid of this catch-22. We feature five words that may make one say: I didn’t know there was a word for it.

gazump

PRONUNCIATION:  (guh-ZUHMP)

MEANING:

verb tr.:
1. To raise the price after accepting an offer from a buyer.
2. To offer a higher price to a seller on something that’s already being sold to another.
3. To preempt something, especially by questionable means.
4. To swindle.

It’s obvious that the brilliant Anu Garg and his readers from 193 different countries have a deep love of words–and I respect that.  Yet my own opinion is that English has too many words, largely the result of the combining of the Saxon language with Latin and its derivatives about 1000 years ago.

Add onto that the jargon that Americans invent at an unbelievable clip.  Take the word “frenemy” as an example, the portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy.” I don’t know when it entered the language, but I’m quite sure it didn’t exist when I was in college 45 years ago, and that’s not because we never had relationships with people that were complicated: friends in some ways but enemies in others.

Well-read Americans have vocabularies that number about 35,000 words, a small fraction of the total, and even that number contains duplicates.  Some say that there are no two words in English that have the precise same meaning, but that’s untrue.  “Feces” and “excrement” are two words for the same thing (the former from middle/late English and the latter from Latin).

I also believe that Spanish, by contrast, has too few.  Depending on the context, the verb “llevar”  can translate in to English as:

to transport, to take (something somewhere)
to carry (something)
to give a ride (in a vehicle)
to wear (clothing)
to escort or to take (someone to a place)
to spend time on
to be more than
to be ahead by (a certain amount of time or distance)
to be older than (comparative)
to manage, handle, or deal with (someone or something)
to run (a business)
to cope with, to get along (through a situation)
to handle (people)
to take or lead to (a place)
to complete a meal
to be friends, to get along
to be fashionable, to be the “in thing”

Give me a break.