LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

 Our vocabulary must be increased constantly if we wish to express ourselves better and more accurately. Since my father gave me the daily task of looking up words in dictionaries when I was about ten, I have been adding new ones to my vocabulary to this day. Not a day goes by that I do not strive to enlarge my stock of words in both English and Spanish. Most additions enter my active vocabulary and become part of my daily discourse. Others fade away and remain only passive elements of my language. That is why I urge you, and myself, to refresh our vocabulary through active reading.  For example, prig is a word I learnt while reading the autobiography of Bertrand Russell. According to him, many of his friends and acquaintances were prigs. Obviously, he did not consider himself one. Yesterday the word popped up again from the page of a book. And the word coy stayed with me while reading Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress . These Anglo-Saxon words, short and to the poin...

In languages, we all have our private vocabulary. There are words we use all the time that we prefer to others. Active vocabulary is called in academic jargon. We understand many phrases and words but never use them. only when we read or hear them. Professional linguists refer to these as passive vocabulary. Example: I often hear now the term "dude"  which my Random House dictionary defines as 1. A man excessively concerned with his clothes, grooming, and manners. 2. Slang: fellow, chap. It dates its origins as American, 1880-85. I have never used the word, and it is not in my active vocabulary. Why? I couldn't tell. I dislike the word and never heard it in my youth. Another example: "vale" as the Peninsular equivalent of ok is alien to my Spanish idiom. I have never used it and never will. I hear it gazillions in a given day. Very irritating. Why do I persevere in saying "supper" when everybody prefers "dinner"?  The concept of a private voc...

The active vocabulary is the largest of all the vocabulary we own in a language. This type of vocabulary is made up of the words and phrases we use on a daily basis and takes up a good 80 percent of our language memory. What about the other 20 percent of our storage memory? It is taken up by passive vocabulary, the words we recognize and know when we hear or read them but do not often use, if ever. We tend to forget them until we are confronted by them. It is as if we had two bags with words: in one pack we have the run-of-the-mill ones we are constantly employing and in the other the obscure, high-brow terms, mots, we do know and recognize only when we stand face to face with them, but will never use. Now, the challenge is to pass the passive words to the active pack, somehow. How? I figure that some words are reluctant to be owned, for whatever reason, and we must try harder to harness them and place them into active service so that we can express ourselves better and with more accur...