Pop culture screws up the modern vocabulary so much, it's all most tragic. Words like cool, awesome, suck, damn, bad-ass, yeah-right, and most of all, like. People are no longer articulate. That should be my New Years Resolution, to vary my word usage. I don't believe that most people are ignorant of big words, they appear all the time in novels and poetry, but the majority of people simply don't think to utilize them. This is especially noticiable in the conversational use of adjectives. If something is good, then it is cool; bad and it sucks. I actually really began to notice this in myself when I was describing my New Years experience to someone and just said it was cool. Upon asking them, they said that theirs was cool. Neither of us was treating this as a throw-away conversation, but we simply didn't want to think about more descriptive words to use.

Sometimes short and to the point communication is useful and prudent. In writing in newspapers you want to be immediatly understood and not have the reader search for any hidden meaning. The same with public speaking. Any speech writer can tell you that you want to use only words three syllabules or less and lots of repetition. But this doesn't mean that eloquence should simply be tossed off. It is important to find a happy medium of still being understood properly without boring the audience.

I was reading some of my Dad's old Chirstmas stories from long ago. I never realized what an impressive vocabulary. Even now I was still using context to understand a couple of the words. I find it a wonder that as a nine year old I wasn't stopping him ever second or third line for clarification. But again, it's easier to understand things of this sort than it is to conjour them out of thin air. In any case, it was fun reading the artistry of the words. Without reverting to a slew of literary devices, he managed to weave a web of words that told the story and was pretty to read at the same time.