The ABC of Vocabulary

Abstract

Vocabulary lists have often puzzled me. Not just the selection. After all, one’s own opinion will never coincide with the compilers’, even when based on the same criteria. I’m not sure hat and coat, let alone cap, would be in my first 500 words in a tropical country. I doubt if cradle is one of my top 200 nouns (primary list A) even for 6 or 7 year olds. Take light and lie in one list I’ve seen. What is supposedly one word may have a bundle of meanings. This is pure cheating; how to get 800 words into a 500 word list. It is confusing, and unhelpful, but what puzzles me more is that the lists are almost always alphabetical. As a species we’ve been around a few million years, and in that time there is not a lot we have devised that is more boring than an alphabetical list of words. I imagine this is because there are no connections within it for the brain to make. Hardly a synapse is nudged. You notice the words are there and that’s all. That’s probably why no one takes the slightest notice of them.