[ExI] commentary by one of ours

[Darren Greer]

2011/12/5 Tom Nowell <nebathenemi at yahoo.co.uk>wrote:
>
>
> Interesting thing I learnt from a neurologist back in my student days: The
> difference between written English and spoken English allows neurologists
> to roughly gauge how good someone's vocabulary was . . .
>

That is interesting. I've spent most of my life reading and writing and
little of it talking. I had a conversation a few years ago with someone
similar and we were both complaining about how lousy our spoken vocabulary
was compared to our written. I had been reading words all my life and
making assumptions about their pronunciation, and had been caught out a few
times. Most notably by pronouncing gazebo in two syllables, which drew
gales of laughter from a room full of college students. After so much of
this kind of thing, you tend to get gun shy about using words in
conversation that you're not used to pronouncing. Of course, that can work
for you as well as against you. E.B. White worried over
his vocabulary constantly, and developed a clean, terse, near-iconic
writing style as a result.
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