Comment on Creating Voice by CrumpetsHarvey
I do want to point out one thing about "the more education a person has, the larger and more polysyllabic their vocabulary." This is true to some point, but it's often not noticeable. I know people with PhD.s who know more jargon, but their conversation isn't markedly different from people who only have a bachelor's. (I mention this because I'm really tired of seeing people denote geniuses in stories by giving them large vocabularies and then smirk because the psychology PhD. doesn't memorize the dictionary for fun.) One of my high school teachers used to say that in essays, impress him with big ideas, not big words, and I still use that measure today. The smartest people I know have ideas about things or can discuss ideas intelligently; they often do not demonstrate a vocabulary larger than mine (and when they do, it's often a social class thing - I'd never heard of 'charcuterie,' but my upper-middle/upper class roommate acted like it was an everyday word).
I don't know a lot of people who only have high school degrees, so I can't talk about their vocabularies.
I don't know a lot of people who only have high school degrees, so I can't talk about their vocabularies.
You're right about that difference between PhD and Bachelors. I suppose I was thinking about the difference between people with a university education and without. The effect is cumulative with class, age and other individual factors as well, but I work with a lot of people who left school without any qualifications and I'm pretty sure that for the majority, their best guess for the meaning of "cumulative" would be "type of cloud?"
High school is mandatory until you're 18 here - that may also be part of it. A few years of school can make all the difference. I just wanted to point out that unless two specialists are talking to each other, people usually don't use words like 'vug' - we usually keep it at a level which we perceive as 'normal.'
