The Severely Limited Vocabulary of the Current Generation

[thesummerqueen]

Depends on the young person. I know plenty of people my age who can't fucking spell or write to save their life. My boyfriend is four years younger than me and smart as fuck in maths and physics but despite having a wide vocabulary himself he still has to google some of the words I use. This is because I read books from a three-century time span. I'm going to know words he doesn't, as he reads books mostly written within the last five decades or less. Soon, kids younger than us will be using words we don't know. That's the nature of language.

Meanwhile, when I first met online a man I dated off and on for some years, he was surprised I was 14 years younger than him - he said I wrote much older than I was. I think it's the nature of every generation to assume that their vocabulary is wider than the next.

My generation is the last to remember a time when "muggle" wasn't in dictionaries. Think about that.

---

To further clarify - it's reading and writing that help extend a person's vocabulary beyond the ordinary, hence my comment - if you encourage this, you get better results. Our society isn't structured around long emails/letters anymore, so either change society, or figure something else out.