I would like to say that this is a fantastic way to start a thread about diction.
Knowing more words certainly can make you appear smarter (unless you use them incorrectly, in which case it makes you appear to be a self-important douche), but I disagree that knowledge of language relates directly to intelligence.
I think that the ability to explain concepts and to speak eloquently on your areas of expertise is learned, not innate. I know that I got much better at teaching and explaining concepts through practice, and I’ve heard before that some of the best teachers are those who had great difficulty with a subject because they are forced to examine their own mental processes and discover how to understand it. People with incredible ability are often unable to expound on methods simply because they just get it.
I have had the unfortunate experience of having met a lot of people who are very well educated, very eloquent, and speak very well; quite a few of them are complete morons outside of a collegiate setting. Being able to remember where you put your car keys, what your significant other’s name is, and how to change a tire are, in my opinion, a hell of a lot more important than knowing words; at least, they are in the Real World (not the TV show). The ability to memorize words does not denote intelligence or “smarts.”
I know a lot of words - I was, before I decided I hate the concept of college, going to be an English major. I love the English language. I revel in it. And that doesn’t make me smarter than my boyfriend, who spells “special” phonetically (“speshul”) but does complex mathematical equations in his head, or my father, who can listen to a computer and know what’s wrong with the hardware, but cannot grasp the use of semicolons in compound sentences.
I dislike people who act as if you’re a complete idiot if you don’t know that you could have used the word “imbecile” or any other long-winded word for idiot in that sentence. I try to keep my writing short and sweet; first because it’s an idiom of newspaper media to do so, and second because I have an incredible attention span and even I get bored when reading something overblown and overlong. Also, I dislike it when people sound as if they’re talking down to me or anyone else. The high-and-mighty act just doesn’t cut it with me.
So, when one speaks well, you infer the person is high and mighty and talking down to you? That’s nuts. Do you hold similar assumptions about people with other skills?
To have command of a large vocabulary and to use it properly and effectively is a skill that is quite impressive. It does, indeed, take brains to gain that skill. I am convinced that those who really master the language – as opposed to those who just throw in some big words now and then – do have an aptitude that is somehow related to how smart they are.
However, having a large vocabulary does not really make you smarter in other ways. Knowing all the synonyms for “good” doesn’t make you a good writer, or a rocket scientist, or a successful person.
Whatever intelligence is, it ain’t set in stone, not by a long shot. The brain is far, far too plastic to think that intelligence is static throughout life. Learning new words, learning language, learning grammar, and how to put it all together will increase synaptic connections as the brain does more and new stuff, and makes more and more connections between ideas and facts and concepts and so on. Even in adulthood the number of synaptic connections can grow as a result of brain stimulation.
Add to that what I spoke of above, that more words means more ideas and concepts that can be captured more accurately, and having those concepts allows more to be added on with greater ease, and you have a recipe for improved smarts.
Does better language for a person improve intelligence? I say hell yes! As will better math, learning to be a mechanic, learning logic, and myriad other things. Intelligence isn’t a trait like height or eye color, because it is a function of the brain. And even in adults, the brain is malleable and plastic. It’s a fact of life.
So, one sees a fella with a great vocabulary who is dumb as a post, is that a counter example? No. We don’t know what he would have been like with a poor vocabulary. What I am saying is that if a person becomes better with her language, she will improve her smarts as well.
You can be really eloquent but still do dumb things. I suppose its what you would consider to be “smart”. To me, the “smartest” thing to do is activities that benefit the self and society in general, such as teaching, or helping someone better themselves. Probably the “smartest” people are the ones who put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of themselves, and still have enough sense to take care of themselves at the same time.
Point…a great vocabulary has nothing to do with “smartness”.
Part of my reason to try and learn to speak “as my listeners would” (including, for those who don’t remember it, such things as having English as my third language) is that I also hate that. Knowing words including knowing “when and how to use them”.
In graduate school, I did some work that combined electrochemistry, theoretical chemistry and organic chemistry. When someone asks me, usually during an interview, to explain the work I did at that time, I ask: “how much chemistry do you know?” If I gave the same explanation to someone whose training is in Social Studies as to someone who is an Analytical Chemist, either the first wouldn’t understand it or the second would find it terribly incomplete. It’s not about knowing the noises…
> After all, thousands of years ago, when the earliest human beings roamed the
> planet, there language was very limited, and almost non-existant. Over the
> course of time people started to learn how to communicate, and today we have
> thousands of diffrent languages all over the world.
You would have to go back further than “thousands of years ago” to reach a point where language was limited and there were fewer languages than there are today. What does “thousands of years ago” mean? Five thousand years ago? Well, five thousand years ago languages were no simpler than today. Furthermore, there were probably more languages back then than there are today. Much of the effect of the conquests of some countries by other countries in the past several thousand years has been to decrease the number of languages spoken in the world. There are something like 6,000 to 7,000 languages spoken today. Five thousand years ago there were probably more like 15,000 languages spoken.
Indeed, there has probably been no change in the average complexity of vocabulary and grammar in an average person’s language in the past 100,000 years. It appears than humans of about 100,000 years ago were as intelligent as modern humans. Their languages had approximately the same complexity of grammar and the same vocabulary size as modern languages. (Note that when I speak of the size of the vocabulary, I mean the number of words that the average person knows. I don’t care that there are 500,000 or 1,000,000 words in some English dictionary. I’m talking about the size of a speaker’s vocabulary. Nearly all English speakers know at least 20,000 words. Very few English speakers know more than about 50,000 words.)
In a concrete sense, your vocabulary will influence your verbal score on the most commonly employed tests of IQ, so the crystalized portion (the range of words you know) will be important. Your facility with language is probably undergirded by a number of facets tapped by other subscales of IQ tests, such as your ability to understand and explain common and not so common proverbs, to describe the similarity between objects or concepts…
So, in a literal way verbal skills are a huge part of your “intelligence.” But in my opinion, they are also a very real component of one’s intelligence. Verbal skills draw upon a large number of cognitive capacities, and particular types of verbal deficits can help to diagnose functional and physiological problems of the brain.
However, it is very true that they are not the only facet of intelligence.
IIRC MIke Tyson has a pretty good vocabularly, but I don’t think he would be considered smart.
On the other hand, if you read new big impressive words, memorize their meaning and how to use them correctly, what would you call that if not intelligence? It’s not the only form intelligence, but it should be considered one of them.
When you put them together into sentences like “I’m going to eat your children,” then yeah, it kind of makes you wonder about how the brain is functioning overall.
