Troi-ify Your Vocabulary

Dear Readers,

The other day as I worked in a kindergarten classroom I overheard the classroom teacher reading a book to the students. The book was a fairly generic children’s book teaching standard kindergarten vocabulary words such as muffler, jumper, and galoshes……wait, what??

These may have been standard kindergarten vocabulary words in the early 1900s when the teacher bought this book, but to my twenty-first century knowledge a muffler is a car part, a jumper is one who jumps, and galoshes have been extinct since our last President outlawed three-syllable words because he couldn’t pronounce them and his advisors suggested a simplified one-syllable term to replace it. And so it came to pass that in present-day Portland, we use words like scarf, dress, and boots. Thereby saving a total of four syllables, increasing the efficiency of a given conversational exchange as follows:

Yesterday: “You look dashing in your new matching jumper and muffler. Now run along and fetch your galoshes so you don’t catch cold in that tempestuous snowstorm.”

Today, after reading Troi’s revolutionary blog: “Put on your dress and scarf and boots and let’s get outta here.”

I move that we simplify the length and complexity of all of our words, thereby increasing the units of information that can be exchanged over a finite period of time. Imagine just how much information I could share in one of my lengthy (yet highly enjoyable!) voice mail messages if I weren’t constrained by multisyllabic words.

Think about it.

–Troi out

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