You have all heard the notion “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” First, I agree entirely and have been fortunate to not let this impede my curiosity. This leads me to the dinner* conversation we had last night when I suggested, with an air of devil’s advocate, that the vocabulary we use today is less rich than it was twenty years ago. This caused a lot of ruffled, if not indignant++, feathers. After a couple of “blows”, a few came to agree that, either via our work environment (emails, etc.), the interaction with our younger kids or–worse yet–television, we are bullied into using a simplistic vocabulary. Truth be told, the inspiration for this thought came when, in a pre-spring cleaning mode, I picked up a pile of my old university papers and read with stupefaction the kind of words that were sprinkled throughout. Yes, I felt there was probably a level of pretension (and possibly some misuse…), but today I feel that the more I know I knew, the more I know I want to know more.
*Dinner was in Paris with complete set of 4 bi-cultural couples.
++Use of “indignant” shows an attempt of expanded vocab word, albeit inappropriately exercised as an adjective of feathers.
I believe that the further we are from education, the simpler we become. We read less complicated books and speak in less sophisitcated languages. Didn’t you have Latin Professors who would speak in their tongue over beers at the local bar? Now that’s a dying art. There are days when I know I will NEVER know half of what I NEED to know!