Whilst trying to create amusing words from the collection of vowels and consonants that Carol Vorderman's replacement, Rachel Riley put on the board my girlfriend had an interesting thought. She asked me how the people in "dictionary corner" managed to find the longest words from the 9 letters so fast so they can point the little camera at them and humiliate the general public. We thought about it and realised that they probably cheated and used computer software to figure it out. Surely they don't just know the whole dictionary off by heart and can recall these nine letter leviathans on demand, you'd surely have to be This led me to another terrible revelation. My vocabulary will be forever crippled as I will never read every word in the dictionary.
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| The wordy magicians of "Dictionary Corner" |
Here's my steam locomotive of thought:
- My attention span is terrible
Honestly, unless something is very interesting to me or I am actively involved, I tend to let my mind wander very easily. So whilst reeling off the words in this grotesque monster of a book that is the Oxford English Dictionary I would probably be daydreaming about riding a robot tiger through a digital wilderness, battling horrific circuit board warriors with microchips for hands.
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| Uh oh |
This one kind of goes without saying but I thought it was worth pointing out. I read very slowly, like a page in about 2 minutes if I'm actually paying attention, and there are approximately 250,000 words in the OED. That's going to take me a long time if I'm chasing any of these other "impossible" feats. Also, if I want to use these words in everyday conversation, I will also have to memorise the definition in case anyone ever calls me out when I drop "tathagatagarbha" (the eternal and absolute essence of all reality according to Buddhism) into my everyday vocabulary.
Yes I know this one is a bit pessimistic but take a look at this fine example of the evolution of the English language:
Yes indeed it does seem as though the cat probably wrote this witty caption himself. This wave of comical language seems to have taken hold of the internet generation, every time I hear the word "lol" spoken aloud I die a little inside. Not that I am totally innocent, I've popped a few "brb"s and "roflcopter"s in my time, but I try and reserve it for the keyboard. This makes me wonder if my hypothetical extended vocabulary would even be understood, let alone appreciated. So it seems a rather pointless endeavour. Here's another gem.
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| At least he spotted his error |
So here we are, my language repertoire shall remain mundane and devoid of any dictionarial (made that one up) spice. Maybe one day I will reside in the upper echelons of Oxford and I can have a Drama undergraduate recite the dictionary to me in the voice of Christoper Lee. Then again that sounds like another one to add to this list...
Horrendous
