A Book on Building Powerful Vocabulary Made Me Feel Powerless
It’s time to update sentence examples in vocabulary books
What does a more powerful vocabulary mean? What kind of powers do vocabulary books have on us?
My vocabulary-building exercise today did not empower me.
Explaining “sublimate”:
“A female whose unconscious desire it is to enslave men, to dominate and destroy all males, becomes the energetic and successful business executive or the president of a college with a largely male faculty, and only her psychiatrist knows that she is sublimating.”
Source: 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary, by Dr. Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis
This book was originally published in 1974, and the revised edition I have was published in 1991. We can rationalize that examples were from the old days, but that’s a lame excuse. According to Amazon, its sales rank 25th in the Word Lists genre, so the content still impacts contemporary readers.
Language Shapes Our Behavior
Language is powerful beyond the reasons mentioned by the authors of vocabulary books. Language can shape our mindset and habits in numerous ways. Sociolinguistics have long argued that the structure of a language…
