![](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-iysBVTZFYMg/Ty3r4xyY2HI/AAAAAAAAA8A/rA-bjU4NH8M/s800/pola250.jpg")
Not so good, but since the most common vocabulary size for non-native English spearkes is from 2,500–9,000 words, at least I’m in the average.
Test Your Vocabulary: how many words do you know?
pretty much what i was expecting
21,500 words aw yeahhh
23,600 words
good thing it didn’t ask me to spell all of them…
Seems studying for the GRE has yet one more use: taking online vocab tests. lol…
My occasional semantic pedantry explained. (Go to http://testyourvocab.com to…test your vocab!) The being ESL probably plays a part, too, since other ESL people have initiated semantic debates with me too, which is to say I understand how my semantic pedantry can be frustrating.
Why use a lot of small words when you can use one big word, right?
EXAMPLE:
“Jeeze, what do you have against fun? It’s just that I think we’re giving a lot of information, and everyone will get bored.”
“We’ll make up for it with alacrity.”
“What does that even mean?”
“Vivacity! Joie de vivre! We can put the fun in the delivery. I mean, if we know our stuff and we’re prepared, we can be cute and casual about it, but we’ll still hit all the points we need to hit. That’s why I’d rather have everyone not rely on notes for the whole presentation, and why I propose we all meet to get wired up on caffeine before the presentation. Believe me, we’ll get them engaged, and we won’t have to resort to…I mean, remember that the goal here is to make a consultancy presentation that a company would pay us 5 grand for. Skits and youtube clips just don’t seem appropriate. Let’s give it a practice run, and you’ll see. Full perfomance level, everyone!”
“Wow. I actually had fun watching us. It wasn’t boring at all.”
“See? Alacrity. We didn’t have to resort to gimmicks, and people won’t probably know that dem be l’arnin!’”
We won the client in this academic simulation ^_^
Sometimes, I have a counterproductive tendency to explain small words in terms of big words as well.
“Do you have good dexterity?” I asked one of my lab partners while motioning with my hands before we worked on dissecting a frog to add chronotropic agents to its heart.
“What does that mean again?”
“Are you good with your hands? The frog’s really small so I might get butter fingers and fuck the frog up.”
“No, but what does it mean exactly? Like, the dictionary meaning.”
“Well, dexterity could refer to manual or mental dexterity so I guess I should’ve said manual dexterity instead. Nimbleness. Adroitness.”
Imagine how much more verbose I’d be if I broke big words into bunches of small words.
