General English Words

[Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim]

1. I agree there might be other ways of seeing this issue. I would never claim such ideas are ultimate
2. The point here is not to dictate but to help students to try to use more specific vocabulary and vary them according to their degrees of intensity.
3. Maybe using such words helps to get a message across more easily but texts lose colour. Content and vocabulary are intertwined.

[bianca]

Pedant wrote:

"A lot of people might not have such a wide, or multi-stepped, range of feelings as academics have, so don't find a need to expand their vocabulary any further. For many people, life is pretty boring - maybe good one day, bad another, with not much in between, or on either side. If people needed to express a more subtle range of emotions wouldn't they'd find a way to do it?"


Of course all human beings -academics or not - are capable of cherishing all sorts of emotions or feelings. That's in the makeup of our human condition, right? Academic people's life can be as boring as anybody's (or even more!). However, being able to express what you feel, whether it is joy, anger, frustration or whatever that might be, requires tools to do it. And language is a powerful one. Lacking the words to express yourself leads to even more frustration, even violence, not to mention the overuse of words at the expense of clarity in meaning.

[Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim]

True Bianca varying your vocabulary expands your thinking, puts a powerful tool in your hands to overcome frustration, ambiguity, makes your style particularly in writing more readable and helps you to avoid monotony.

[bianca]

Originally Posted by Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim

Certain English words are overused by learners of English. Word like: good, bad and happy are usually general ie they don’t make speaker’s statement specific. In addition they make a text boring. For example instead of saying happy you can say: I was basically content, pleased, overjoyed or ecstatic as if putting them on a scale of varying degrees. What other words in your opinion learners should avoid overusing to make their texts more interesting? Ideas are welcome.

Yes, I totally agree. Overwriting, overstating, and overusing words is a killer in a language. Communication between people has and has always had two sides: the one who talks/writes and the listener, or the reader. Once you wish to communicate smth, then you also want your listener to understand you clearly. That makes for effective communication, which everyone strives for, right? Well, overusing words has the power to destroy, for listeners or readers, the power of your enthusiasm.

I guess that words and phrases such as: "like", "sort of", "kind of", "you know", "very", "pretty", "rather" - so called qualifiers - are overused in both spoken and written English. Have you ever heard of this: "I sort of, you know, felt pretty stupid when he said that." This is a breezy style of communicating, a style that is often the work of an egocentric, i.e. a person who imagines that everything that comes to mind is of general interest. The listener might soon lose interest in his/her topic. We should be more watchfull of this rule - that of avoiding overusing words - but we are all violating it every now and then.

Here you have a good example of crippling the clarity in meaning, when you couldn't be more explicit by simply saying: "I felt stupid/embarrassed when he said that". The first example above is often a poor substitute for expressing your frame of mind - when your style is riddled with such words, it has a countereffect on the listener; it is irritating and self-defeating. As for the written English, overused words are the leeches that infest the pond of prose. As Dr. Jamshid wrote before, imagine reading a prose full of repetitions of certain words or phrases - that would be "pretty" dull.

[Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim]

Thanks Bianca. Phrases like: sort of, kind of are so called vague language used when we cannot find the exact word to describe something: It's a sort of tragedy ie not exactly tragedy but more or less. Other words or phrases of vague language are:
Thing: How are things
Stuff: and stuff like that or things like that

Jamshid

[pedant]

I suppose, like er, it sort of depends on who you were communicating with.....

...but perhaps one might prefer one to state: "One's use of English, for example: one's choice of words and levels of grammatical correctness ultimately may be determined by one's perception of the audience with which one was communicating."

(note the deliberate use of the NON split infinitive where "may ultimately be" would actually be more natural).

I know which method of communication normal people would choose!

As for vague language - this is naturally human and the very reason why humans function so well. One never crosses a road thinking "it is 100% safe, or it is 100% unsafe", one's mental decisions are constantly being modified within the vague and fluid parameters of yes...yesss... ..errr...maybee... ...ok....perhaps..phew!". A human never works out such things as "it's 35 metres across the road, that car is doing 40Kph, therefore I've got 0.8 seconds to get across". People who did that became extinct many years ago. Why should language be any different? This is the major reason why robots never did take over the world. Robots can only work to rules, humans work best by ignoring them!

It would be really dull if everything could only be expressed in absolute terms. Let people choose their own level of exactitude, and don't criticise them for their choice. Most of the world is fuzzy, not precise...that is what makes it interesting. Stuff is stuff - indeterminate but understood by everyone. 'Things' are things, indeterminate, but something recognisable. The use of phrases such as 'well, er, it was kinda like that' is far from imprecise, it actually reinforces a state of impreciseness that existed...the story-teller recognises that it was not a precise state.

There is a whole science devoted to developing fuzzy methods where the requirement NOT TO HAVE TO specify stuff precisely (the choice of 'stuff' was deliberate) is precisely the goal to be achieved, not an impediment to progression. Indeed one could extend the argument to say that the requirement by academics that everyone be precise is one major cause of discontent and strife - in order to satisfy that requirement one can easily be forced to take sides and thus fight for one or the other, rather than accept the concept that everyone's opinions are equally valid, whether one personally thinks them boring or not.

Southpark summed up this concept quite beautifully: "The marklark went to marklark and the marklark didn't like it so we took marklark to marklark and marklark said 'marklark' so we did! The words don't matter - the context, and the speaker, is everything.

[bianca]

One thing has to made clear: formal or informal, E. has to be clear in communication. That doesn't mean that "stuff like that" is forbidden - could possibly be looked down upon by some snobbish people. The bottom line is that an ambiguous and a vague language (there's a slight difference in meaning between them) marrs the inteligibility of a sentence or a text. This applies to both informal and formal E. But while informal E. can get away with such errors of interpretation, formal E. is more pretentious. Misunderstandings there can be costly.

However, I guess that academics are so immersed in the formal language that they actually get to use it even in informal situations, which is a little ridiculous. But no more ridiculous then addressing a judge in court by saying: "hi there, what's up?"

The formality in language is also a sign of power (reminds me of Latin in Medieval English). Language is being used to subdue, to impose respect. In this respect, like I said above, "stuff like that" could be used to your disadvantage. But this is another issue.

bianca