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...

   Many websites offer language help under the heading “Word of the Day.” They mean well, but they peddle arcane vocabulary that has little to do with our contemporary needs. I say this despite being a pedant and a lover of precise words. Years ago, in college, I bought a little booklet entitled Ten Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary , which was filled with obscure, archaic terms nobody would ever understand in daily discourse. I see that this practice continues, to my regret, because I endorse building vocabulary in context, not in lists. I always try to expand my vocabulary when reading, especially literature produced by good writers.      Expand your vocabulary by reading and looking up words you encounter, and not by relying on lists like this: Fortuitous Vilipend Nefarious Rancor Mellifluous Verdigris Slopulation                   

  I do not mean to flog a dead horse, but I must insist.   Sorry. Active reading is the best way to polish, improve, and perfect your foreign language. By active reading, I mean looking up the unknown words and jotting them down in a notebook. If you can copy the context, i.e. the whole sentence where they appear, so much the better. The sentence that illustrates the meaning of a word is called a "citation." Once in a while, you can review your notes, reflect upon them, memorize them, and incorporate them into your vocabulary. This is the way to expand the horizon of your vocabulary. This proactive measure will always keep you in good stead in your language studies. No pain, no gain! 

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...