A Book on Building Powerful Vocabulary Made Me Feel Powerless
It’s time to update sentence examples in vocabulary books
What does a more powerful vocabulary mean? What kind of powers do vocabulary books have on us?
My vocabulary-building exercise today did not empower me.
Explaining “sublimate”:
“A female whose unconscious desire it is to enslave men, to dominate and destroy all males, becomes the energetic and successful business executive or the president of a college with a largely male faculty, and only her psychiatrist knows that she is sublimating.”
Source: 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, by Dr. Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis
This book was originally published in 1974, and the revised edition I have was published in 1991. We can rationalize that examples were from the old days, but that’s a lame excuse. According to Amazon, its sales rank 25th in the Word Lists genre, so the content still impacts contemporary readers.
Language Shapes Our Behavior
Language is powerful beyond the reasons mentioned by the authors of vocabulary books. Language can shape our mindset and habits in numerous ways. Sociolinguistics have long argued that the structure of a language affects the way its user’s perceive and make choices (Labov 1972). Recently more scholars use various grammatical features to study the language’s impact on social economics outcomes.
Why do some countries save more than others? For example, in 2019, the saving rate was 44% in China and lower than 19% in the United States. Could language have anything to do with this huge difference?
Behavioral economists Keith Chen found that language affects our saving habits. Comparing to English, Chinese is a futureless language. There are few markings in Chinese that distinguish the present from the future. On the other hand, English is a futured language, meaning there is a lot more information describing the time dimension of our actions. For example, when describing the mood in English:
- the present: I am happy.
- the future: I will be happy tomorrow when…
- the past: I was happy.
In Chinese, “I happy” serves all three purposes.
Chen (2013) found that higher future time markings in language mean that we are more aware of the distinction between future and present and therefore leads to actions that discount the future more. Speakers with lower future time markings save more, have better health outcomes, and retire with more assets.
Gender Marking in Languages
Languages also vary in their effort of emphasizing gender.
I attempted to learn German in college, and I quickly gave up because the gender markers were too confusing for me. English has significantly fewer gender markings, and Chinese has even fewer. In Chinese, “he” and “she” shares the same pronunciation even though they have unique characters. Till today, I still get “he” and “she” occasionally mixed up while talking because of the influence of my mother tongue.
Are gender markings in the language associated with gender equality?
Heavier gender marking in a language is associated with a larger gender wage gap, lower political and top managerial participation.
The language matters.
Language affects our behaviors without us even noticing. It is a lot easier to update sentence examples than to change grammatical markings.
Let’s build a more powerful vocabulary to empower everyone.