Recently, I encountered an odd bit of writing advice in a book by a well-known author: use short paragraphs, keep sentences short, use simple words. No complex compound sentences, no lengthy paragraphs ripe with thought, no unfamiliar words that might give a reader pause. Prose should be fast, like a newspaper, like a Twitter post, wresting the reader’s attention from one snappy sentence to the next.
I’ve already broken most of these rules in this post, in part because it would take considerable effort to force my natural prose into such a literary straightjacket, but also because I think it poor advice. I assert this even while humbly acknowledging that the author is a New York Times bestselling author with a considerable following—a following far larger than mine is, or perhaps ever will be. His following exists, I would gently suggests, not because of but in spite of the dull and uninspiring prose that fills his books. Nor is he alone. It is well-attested that we live in a culture of declining attention spans, where we have grown accustomed to feeding on information in bite-sized pieces, like hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party.
As our attention has suffered, so too have our vocabularies. Global trends suggest that although our levels of educational attainment are increasing, our vocabularies are decreasing over time. We may have more letters behind our names, but we have fewer words in our brains. This stands to reason. The median American reads only four books a year (a number inflated by those who read dozens), whereas one third (31%) of Canadians have not read a single book in the past year. Meanwhile, the average social media user spends 2 hours and 31 minutes on social platforms per day, which is a far cry from teenage users, who tally up a whopping daily 8 hours and 39 minutes—more time than a full time job. This suggests a marked shift from a literary to a predominantly visual mental diet. The language that we do interact with has been curtailed and simplified for mass consumption. No wonder we’re at a loss for words.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. Not only have we have lost words of incredible charm and beauty, but this loss of words also creates a vacuum in our individual and cultural psyches. Language is the lens through which we perceive, interpret, and understand the world. If we lack precise language, we cannot enjoy precise thought or feel precise emotion.
In her beautiful work, Caring For Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn McEntyre notes, “When a word falls into disuse, the experience goes with it. We are impoverished not only by the loss of a precise descriptor, but by the atrophy and extinction of the very thing it describes.” McEntyre highlights the largely antiquated words merriment and felicity as examples of this phenomenon, both of which capture the essence of emotions no longer recognized in our culture. Merriment she defines as: “a common sense of what there is to laugh about, and a certain mental health… that understands darkness, but doesn’t succumb to cynicism.”
Felicity bears no less exquisite a definition, and McEntyre’s thoughts are worth quoting at some length: “[Felicity is] something like rational contentment, entailing acceptance, considered compromise, and self-knowledge… Felicity seeks happiness actively, but its actions are quiet and measured rather than flamboyant and impulsive. It deepens by having reflected on one’s own good to realize that one’s own good consists in appreciation and service of others.” This is a far cry from the more modern understanding of “happiness,” which denotes a spontaneous, almost overwhelming sense of externally manifested pleasure. This too has its place. But when our vocabulary is limited to a single understanding of “happiness,” we, losing our ability to experience other subtler and more intentional forms of happiness, struggle to secure as permanent an emotion characterized by transience.
The loss of words used to describe less pleasant emotions is also to our detriment. How often have you heard someone deem themselves “depressed,” overlooking other perhaps more suitable descriptors: melancholic, grieving, dispirited, blue, dejected? Each possesses a distinct meaning, and each enables a unique emotional experience. The otherwise rich, pensive sadness of melancholy becomes clinically foreboding when it is branded as depression, and what could have been treated with a brooding concerto and a good book is instead prescribed a medication and treated as an illness.
Language, however rich, can never fully capture the breadth and depth of human experience; however, we straightjacket our capacity to richly and fully experience life when our linguistic repositories are depleted and filled with superficial words. A broad vocabulary, by contrast, broadens one’s ability to recognize, taste, savour, and delight in the abundance of a nuanced existence, to feel more deeply, to live more richly.
This may be achieved through the intentional and contentious curation of your vocabulary. Learning a new word is not merely an act of rote memorization, but an encounter with an unfamiliar land, a ritual in which you eat a word and humbly allow it to breathe into your life, adding layer upon layer of nuance and meaning to your world.
For the first time, you may become attuned to the soft susurrus of pines as the resplendent sun sinks towards the horizon. You may discover that your life, once thought commonplace, is in fact marked by quiet felicity, and that your happiness is merely a different colour than you had originally expected. You may come face to face with pensive sadness and discover that melancholy, like grief, is its own journey, impermanent and bittersweet, a primaveral season that precedes your personal spring. You may delight in unexpected apricity on a winter’s day, watch the caliginous dusk give way to dawn over your morning coffee, or enjoy an evening of great merriment with your closest friends. And perhaps you will also discover that living better is often simply living deeper.
Deyan Georgiev, “How Much Time Do People Spend on Social Media in 2023?.”
Marilyn McEntyre, Caring For Words in a Culture of Lies.