You have all heard the notion “the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” First, I agree entirely and have been fortunate to not let this impede my curiosity. This leads me to the dinner* conversation we had last night when I suggested, with an air of devil’s advocate, that the vocabulary we use today is less rich than it was twenty years ago. This caused a lot of ruffled, if not indignant++, feathers. After a couple of “blows”, a few came to agree that, either via our work environment (emails, etc.), the interaction with our younger kids or–worse yet–television, we are bullied into using a simplistic vocabulary. Truth be told, the inspiration for this thought came when, in a pre-spring cleaning mode, I picked up a pile of my old university papers and read with stupefaction the kind of words that were sprinkled throughout. Yes, I felt there was probably a level of pretension (and possibly some misuse…), but today I feel that the more I know I knew, the more I know I want to know more.

*Dinner was in Paris with complete set of 4 bi-cultural couples.
++Use of “indignant” shows an attempt of expanded vocab word, albeit inappropriately exercised as an adjective of feathers.

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