We are what we remember, our words included. So how many words do you know? Five thousand? Ten? Let me ask this another way: how many words have you met in your life, and retained? Vocabulary, after all, is a shorthand label for retrievable semantic memory.
This chapter plunges into the semantic, exploring how your cognitive health is reflected by the size and suppleness of your personal word-hoard, as vocabulary was once known. Along the way, we’ll also summon puzzles and quizzes, seeing the role they play in verifying your known words, in addition to implanting the new.
So, again, how many words are listed in your mental Rolodex—twelve thousand? Fifteen thousand? Let’s stick to English, to keep things simple. Or as simple as possible, since estimating which words your brain possesses is a special brand of folly. Where do you start? At A, of course, so: aardvark, aback, abacus, abalone, abandon.
But ‘abandon’ is the tip of the iceberg, because most words are part of a related bundle. ‘Abandon’ propagates ‘abandoned’ and ‘abandoning’, ‘abandoner’ and ‘abandonment’. With one verb, you’ve inflated your vocab to five, which doesn’t seem right. That’s why linguists only count lemmas. If you don’t know the term, let me advance your word-hoard by one. Greek for ‘premise’, ‘lemma’ is a word adopted by the sciences, in particular mathematics where lemmas (or lemmata) are propositions proven on the way to testing further propositions. In linguistics, lemma applies to any headword in a dictionary, such as abandon versus its numerous offspring. Still, the mess remains, since where does a lemma start and an offshoot begin?
Wiser to defer to the dictionary, where any subsidiary word is listed within the headword’s entry. Laugh, for instance, counts as a single word, waiving the need to tally laughter and laughed, laughing and laughingly, while laughing gas and laugh track count as separate headwords, each phrase its own distinct parcel of meaning and therefore valid as a word (or lemma, as you now know).
READY, SET, COGITATE!
Below is a series of vocab chains, going from the familiar to the more arcane. How far along each sequence can you get until you strike a term that baffles? Definitions are below.
1. acumen—talisman—salacious—turpitude—prolix—zaftig
2. brio—limn—transom—martinet—sortilege—baldachin
3. despot—diurnal—vicissitude—lapidary—niqab—pandiculate
4. vestige—restive—redolent—louche—caesura—velleity
ANSWERS
1. shrewdness, lucky charm, lewd, lethargy, verbose, voluptuous
2. verve, portray, window’s crosspiece, disciplinarian, drawing of lots, religious canopy
3. tyrant, relating to day, variation, stonecutter, Muslim veil, stretch and yawn
4. trace, fidgety, aromatic, sleazy, musical pause, faint wish
There, we have that much sorted. But when is a word a word? This paragraph has fifty-nine words, including the word fifty-nine, but do we include numbers in the final count? No, is the simple answer, although numbers are counted to a point, where four could denote a rowing team, a cricket boundary, a playing card, an early hour.
The next headache is wordworthiness, where words like rando for random, or murses for male nurses, feel too hokey to rate inclusion. Even now, trotting out wordworthiness only underlines how nonce words can still make sense, despite eluding the dictionary.
Quandary number four is polysemy, or multiple meanings. Brain the noun can become brain the verb, meaning to strike on the head. Many words carry this versatility. Count can be a noun, a verb, or a creep in Transylvania. Likewise skim can mean to read quickly, to flick pebbles across water, and scalp the cream off milk. Yet notice, in all three cases, a shallow and quick action is implied, deepening the dilemma of distinct meaning versus additional nuance.
Still, if you want some hardish numbers, then let’s turn to Shakespeare. If anyone had a wealth of words, it was him. His works alone, from plays to sonnets, contain around 900,000 words in sum. Reduce that to unique words, and then down to lemmas, and the writer’s vocabulary floated around 25,000, from the commonplace to the insufflated (full of air).
In modern terms, that’s not a colossal sum, but still head-spinning. To quote British linguist David Crystal, ‘No other author matches these impressive figures.’ To quote Hamlet, ‘Words, words, words.’ To meet a few more words, and explore how vocabulary enriches your mind, let’s go quizzing.
The basket in your head
Poilu is:
(a) French soldier
(b) taro paste
(c) facial hair
(d) bad poet
Acedia is:
(a) alien
(b) famine
(c) sloth
(d) refuge
Squill is:
(a) shriek
(b) sea onion
(c) tiny squid
(d) small shrimp
For the record, I scored two out of three. Poilu might be familiar to regular crossworders. Any short word ending in U is bound to be on high rotation. To that long-serving French soldier (an infantryman from World War I) you can add haiku, beau, lieu, ecru (yellowy-brown), coypu (beaver-like rodent) and, finally, adieu. Granted, you probably won’t catch an ecru coypu, unless you happen to solve a stack of crosswords. Nor will a puzzle novice need to contemplate a poilu composing a haiku, yet that arcane litter is strewn across most solvers’ greyscape like adhesive glitter.
As for acedia, the quiz’s second word, I’d met that oddity early in my puzzle addiction, but not via clues in this case. Rather I’d met this synonym of sloth when reading the Collins Dictionary in 1988. (‘Hello, my name’s David and I’m a dictionary reader.’) Recently, I returned to the notebook I’d kept at the time and upon seeing words like anlace and canephor, I failed to recall what they meant. They must have entered my short-term memory like murmurs, too faint for the hippocampus to register.
But acedia somehow stuck—and the reason lies in the pincer action of reading and solving. The obscure word entered my temporal lobe courtesy of a Gordius clue in The Guardian back in 2012:
Listlessness can make one reject help (6)
The clue’s wordplay element entails ACE (one), then AID (help) rejected to create DIA. Combined, the two pieces spell ACEDIA, a synonym of listlessness.
Don’t panic if that clue makes little sense at this point—we’ll unpick the mechanics of cryptic language in Part Two. The clue’s purpose here is to illustrate how crosswords, more than most language streams, are likely to summon esoteric words, much like ‘esoteric’. One puzzle—cryptic or quick—can rummage the marginalia of a wider vocabulary, giving the passive words a gentle prod, reviving them in your memory for being summoned by the puzzle. Or, should the word be unfamiliar, the grid is there to help deliver it. With this playful repetition, a peripheral word can become a neural print, processed by the hippocampus into semantic memory, helping to fight the natural acedia of later years.
GRAIN BY GRAIN
The Free Rice Vocabulary Quiz <www.freerice.com> is a website combining brain food with real food for those in need. Visitors to the site can choose one of 60 levels of difficulty, from household words to out-there obscurities, including squill (that notorious sea-onion) on Level 57.
Your vocabulary is sure to grow, since whenever a word is missed, such as squill in my case, a subsequent quiz will return to the term, giving you a chance to snare the correct response. In so doing, you get to file the word in short-term memory, as well as guarantee the United Nations World Food Programme will be the richer for ten more grains of rice.
Squill, therefore, was my downfall. Before the earlier test, I’d never seen the word, not in crosswords or novels, not in research or conversation. I put that down to sea onions ranking poorly on the topical menu. Or any menu, since the bulbs are toxic, though Hippocrates did prize squill as a jaundice remedy. Perhaps now, with the Hippocrates curio working in tandem, squill may stick in the brain, leaving the blackboard mode of short-term memory for the realm of the declarative memory, or what facts and figures you have on call.
The mini-quiz is a foretaste of the Free Rice Vocabulary Quiz (see more details in the sidebar), the sort of test that does a lot to reinforce language and memory. In the same vein, there are quick crosswords too, each clue a means of accessing your word-hoard, each puzzle an informal inventory of the words you carry.
While quick clues don’t tease the brain with inbuilt riddles, such as Gordius’s acedia clue, the style’s crisscross diagram still allows for unfamiliar words to enmesh with the familiar. You fill in what you know, and letter-pattern helps you deduce what you don’t, much as HM used anchor points to help intuit fresh input. So then, returning to the scenario of a stumped solver, a person in pursuit of a rare word meaning listlessness, the quick grid would offer a pattern like this:
Consider these your anchor points. Your challenge is to exploit what you know to access what you don’t. Here trial and error comes into play, your brain surmising what letters are likely to occupy the blanks.
Germans have a word for such cognition, as only Germans can. Sprachgefühl describes the intuitive feel one has for language, your sense of how words are constructed, and how they sit amid other words. The compound splices two nouns, where Sprache (language, or speech) accompanies Gefühl (feeling).
Juggle the possible suspects, from OCEDIA to ECUDIA—which aren’t words—and soon your Sprachgefühl will settle on ACEDIA. A dictionary check will confirm your word-feel, assuming you’re not too listless.
To enliven your own word-hoard I recommend the neural gym of crosswords—solve and stretch, solve and save. And whatever puzzles fail to provide, <www.freerice.com> can make up the shortfall, a site teeming with quizzes and quirkiness, from anlace (a two-edged dagger) to canephor (a sculpted figure carrying a basket on its head).
Homo lexicus
So when I was twelve years old, my mum said she wanted to talk to me about something. Um, my mum and I didn’t have a lot of talks. I loved her very much but she was kind of an intimidating figure. She was one of those corporate working mums, with the beeper and the pantsuit and the rollie-suitcase. She yelled important things into phones a lot. And she was away a lot on business. But she sat me down in the living room and she told me that she was pregnant.
Erin Barker, the twelve-year-old in question, is now in her 20s. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She also has two trophies on her shelf, for twice winning The Moth’s GrandSLAM storytelling competition with tales like the one above.
CROSSWORD-ESE—ODD WORDS THAT SOLVERS KNOW TOO WELL
Regular crossworders won’t need to read the zoo plaques when encountering the okapi, the eland, the coypu or gnu. Ditto goes for the oryx or oribi. Nor will they miss a beat when meeting any of these frequent answers:
ADIT—mine’s opening
AGA—Turkish official
AMAH—Indian nurse
ANOA—dwarf buffalo
APSE—church recess
ARETE—glacial ridge
ECLAT (and ELAN)—panache
ELVER—baby eel
ENNUI—malaise
ERATO—Greek muse
ERG—unit of energy
ETUDE—piano exercise
ETUI—sewing case
EWER—large pitcher
GUMBO—Cajun stew
IMAGO—adult insect
IMAM—Islamic leader
LIANA—jungle vine
LUAU—Hawaiian feast
OGEE—S-shaped moulding
OKRA—gumbo ingredient (see GUMBO)
POI—Polynesian staple
RANI—Indian queen
STOA—covered walkway
TOR—prominent crag
The Moth was hatched in New York City, back in 1997. Every few weeks, people gather in bars and clubs to tell stories on stage, drawing listeners closer to the light with their words.
Because that’s the other dimension to vocabulary. More than a reckoning of the words you possess, vocabulary is also a hoard of connotation, a potential arsenal of rhetorical or emotional affect. This last section delves into that idea, meeting both clues and sentences to see what influence they confer on our brain.
Erin, the Moth champion, has a raconteur’s flair—her voice is warm, her language disarming and her narratives pull you in. Thanks to those qualities, hers was the perfect material for a brain experiment at the University of California. A neuroscience team at Gallant Lab slid seven people into an fMRI scanner, wiring their skulls to monitors, as well as hooking up an audio feed of Moth stories. Alex Huth, the postdoc at the trial’s helm, was hoping to see which segments of the brain recorded the greatest activity according to what words were being heard in which stories.
‘The data we got in this language experiment were very complicated,’ concedes Professor Jack Gallant, the lab’s overseer. ‘In fact, even our reviewers had a hard time wrapping their brains around it.’ Because what they found was head-spinning, mind-bending. As the stories unfolded, the cortex twinkled. ‘At the grossest level,’ Gallant says, ‘the experiment shows that each individual semantic concept, the meaning of each word, is represented in discrete brain locations, where each location represents a constellation of semantic concepts.’
Gallant uses the example of ‘dog’, the word. ‘You know how a dog smells. You know how it looks, how it sounds when it barks. Maybe you had a dog bite you when you were a small child. And all that dog-related information will factor into your interpretation of the meaning of a story about a dog. All those brain areas associated with those different kinds of information will become activated to some extent.’
Dog, of course, is just one word. Erin Barker (no pun intended) has already uttered 90 in her opener, so imagine the carnival a listener’s brain becomes upon hearing about her mum and that fateful conversation. Phrase by phrase—whether volunteers remembered their own mum, or maybe a disdain of loud phone-talkers—the disparate neurons responded to what they received, extracting fuel from the blood as each voxel (one of 50,000 volumetric units across the grey matter) was illuminated.
Apart from processing emotions, or dredging personal history, the brain can also play Dr Roget when receiving language, whether those words are heard or seen. Take a term like ‘talk’, say, which Erin uses in her opening sentence. In context, the word has a clear meaning. Here it denotes a private conversation between mother and daughter. There’s no ambiguity. But that’s not to say that versatile words with multiple meanings and shades don’t rebound about the cerebrum until that sense is confirmed.
In fact, it seems likely that the brain categorises and subdivides words as they enter your consciousness, much like a librarian stacks their trolley according to the Dewey system.
Buoyed by the voxel patterns, Alex Huth and colleagues began to draft a brain atlas of language, a regional dictionary across the cortex. Although the experiment was not extensive, with only five men and two women monitored, making the atlas as much speculation as anything akin to a document of cadastral accuracy, the map was nonetheless fascinating. Huth arrayed colour-coded voxels into areas like Visual and Tactile, Outdoor and Body Parts, Time and Violence—a bubble-chart resembling a three-dimensional thesaurus.
It’s intriguing to imagine running this same experiment to observe the brain of a puzzler at work. While a story like Erin’s wields greater emotive clout than your average seek-a-word, there’s no denying a bed of clues, or simple wordlist, has far greater lexical range than most stories can boast. In mainstream fiction, there are boundaries of word choices compared to a cryptic clue, which is a licence to pepper a solver’s brain with no end of associations, the glossary unlimited, each clue a new context to decipher.
Like this treat from The Times, puzzle 10,972:
Club seals and we’d get hides (4,5)
Sorry, I know the image is bloody, but crosswords can confront your brain like that, emotive as much as deceptive. In one clue-set you can travel from Jane Austen to Austin, Texas, from acedia to Antarctica. If a Moth story can light up your brain, then a puzzle grid is liable to make the cerebrum dazzle.
The answer, by the way, has nothing to do with seal murder. This is called a hidden formula, where the solution is enfolded within the clue itself. Here the signpost for this ruse is hides, as in the clue hides the answer. The answer’s definition, unrelated to seal leather or icecaps, is club. Look past the gore, the wallop, those innocent eyes, and you’ll see the clue hides SAND WEDGE in consecutive letters, your missing club. And this is just a single clue among 36 in your average crossword, so the full set is bound to test your word-feeling as much as your feelings.
