There's an interesting story in the Globe & Mail newspaper about how North America is dumbing down, in a sense, when it comes to our vocabulary and use of "big words."
The story:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070615.wvocabulary0516/BNStory/Front/
What a shame. Why use "sad" when you can say "lachrymose"? Why "beautiful" when you can use "pulchritudinous"? According to the story the average North American adult knows only 30,000 to 60,000 words, out of a potential "working vocabulary" of 700,000. That's tragic (calamitous).
Come now, readers. Expand your vocabulary!
Word-of-the-Day Web sites:
http://wordsmith.org/words/today.html
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl
http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/
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