When some people speak, we feel that precious gems are coming out of their mouths. You can listen to them for hours together and not feel bored. In fact, you feel enchanted. You are often transported to a world of dreamy castles, enchanted woods and glorious mornings.
They use words in their speech that are evocative and beautiful to the mind and ear. They are speech poets. In any dinner party, they would weave a web with their words in which the hapless guests get caught. When you listen to such people, you want to learn better English vocabulary.
Don’t get me wrong. To use good vocabulary, you should have good ideas too. Mere words that don’t mean anything would be hollow.
But how do you learn vocabulary?
We know you are tired of this advice. When you are small, your teachers would force you to read certain books. Because there is compulsion involved, most probably you would hate those books. You might still read, but for the sake of not getting punished by the teacher. Such reading might get you some basic vocabulary to get by in life, but will not give you much more. Very often such phrases as ‘how are you’ and ‘I am fine’ come in this category. Still, they are, English vocabulary.
Gone are the times when people pored over the morning newspaper. That ritual with a cup of coffee and the newspaper is all but nonexistent now. Even the television is taking a bad seat these days, with just sport enthusiasts preferring to watch the game on the big screen. Everything else that is fed to us in the name of news or entertainment comes to us in the small devices we call smart phones and laptops. On our laptops, widows and Microsoft use English. The problem comes only when you ask what kind of English vocabulary they use. Normal emails and official correspondence still use standard English vocabulary, but when it comes to WhatsApp and other chatting platforms, it is an entirely new game.
This brings us to slangs and colloquialism, which also come under the purview of English vocabulary. Reddit and telegram, the X and Facebook and TikTok—all social media have introduced a new variety of English vocabulary that is incomprehensible to the older generation that is trained in the King’s English. What is important to note is that these are legitimate words for social media users. These are not some short forms used for parsimony. The following are some of these newbies into English vocabulary:
Will these words ever get into a standard dictionary? Only time will tell. But in the meanwhile, such vocabulary is used all over the world in all devices created by and known to human beings. It may not be long before they find a place in a standard dictionary.
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