<p>Have you listened to people speaking pidgin? No, not the feathered pigeon. Pidgin is the kind of broken language that people who are not fluent in that language speak. </p>.<p>So why are people not fluent? It could be that the language is new to them; that they haven’t heard it spoken around them much. And perhaps the single most prevalent reason is just not knowing enough words to express what you want to say. Your gestures and expressions can make up for a lot but ultimately, you need the words. </p>.<p>If you’re a Shakespeare, you might make up the words as you go along. Shakespeare created around 3,000! Charles Dickens too created some useful expressions like ‘round the clock’ and ‘boredom’. But creativity comes from knowledge. The more words you know, the greater your right to make up new ones.</p>.<p class="bodytext">By the way, everyone has a vocabulary. There’s a scale that goes from bad to fantastic depending on the number of words you know. 8,000 is a minimum for communication while about 25,000 could be considered good; and that’s in spite of the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary estimates that around 1,70,000 are in regular use!</p>.<p class="bodytext">However, I do think that adding words to your vocabulary should be fun. Reading of course, is the best way to do this and you don’t have to keep a dictionary beside you to look up every new word. Just go with the flow… you’ll figure it out! Reading, however, is a solitary activity and sometimes we like to do things with people. That’s where word games come in.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Do you play Wordle? It’s not very complicated and win or lose, it can’t take up too much of your time even on a busy day. For years now, the world seems to be playing it. No, you don’t need a great vocabulary to win. Wordle uses only 5-letter words after all and which English-speaking person doesn’t know quite a few of those? (There are 4 in the last sentence alone.) You’ve 6 tries to crack each word. I’ve been playing Wordle daily for a long while now and the only hiccup that I had was that spellings use ‘or’ (color) instead of ‘our’ (colour) and that doesn’t come naturally to me. So, I did a little digging. Wordle was invented by a Welshman called Wardle. Hah! Then why the American spelling? Well, he created the game for his American partner to help with Covid-time boredom!</p>.<p class="bodytext">Though the official NYT Wordle allows you only 1 word a day, there are myriad versions currently available that allow you as many as you like. But if you’re the competitive kind then only the original Wordle will work for you to compete with friends or family because that’s where everyone gets the same word, made available at the same time, for you to race everyone fair and square. Catching up in popularity is Quordle — Wordle multiplied by 4 with 9 tries to solve all 4 of the grids. Wordle on steroids you might say.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Let’s take a few steps back. The first word game I ever played was Scrabble. I was 6. The children’s version I had was brightly coloured and the board was small requiring far shorter words to get extra points. I loved it. I didn’t know at the time, that I was ‘building’ a vocabulary but learning is always more fun when you don’t think of it as ‘learning’. The elderly friend who taught me the game made sure that that was a well-kept secret.</p>.<p class="bodytext">In school, in my day, we used to play ‘name, place, animal, thing’ which involved writing down words in each column beginning with randomly chosen alphabets. Who thought that the more words you knew, the better your chances of winning.</p>.<p class="bodytext">And then there was Hangman. By this time, we did know that our man was most likely to hang if you didn’t guess the word fast enough!</p>.<p class="bodytext">But one of the most fun things that you can do with words is try your hand at writing limericks. Limericks are 5-line ‘poems’ that follow a particular rhyming pattern — aabba. In the old days most of these used to be pretty naughty but today, we like to make them funny. Edward Lear wrote a whole book on them called ‘A Book of Nonsense’:</p>.<p class="bodytext">There was an Old Man with a beard,</p>.<p class="bodytext">Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!</p>.<p class="bodytext">Two Owls and a Hen,</p>.<p class="bodytext">Four Larks and a Wren,</p>.<p class="bodytext">Have all built their nests in my beard!’</p>.<p class="bodytext">Here’s one that ChatGPT came up with:</p>.<p class="bodytext">Words can be tricky and fun,</p>.<p class="bodytext">They jump and they dance in the sun.</p>.<p class="bodytext">They rhyme and they play,</p>.<p class="bodytext">And help us to say,</p>.<p class="bodytext">The things that we think and have done!</p>.<p class="bodytext">Can you write one?</p>
<p>Have you listened to people speaking pidgin? No, not the feathered pigeon. Pidgin is the kind of broken language that people who are not fluent in that language speak. </p>.<p>So why are people not fluent? It could be that the language is new to them; that they haven’t heard it spoken around them much. And perhaps the single most prevalent reason is just not knowing enough words to express what you want to say. Your gestures and expressions can make up for a lot but ultimately, you need the words. </p>.<p>If you’re a Shakespeare, you might make up the words as you go along. Shakespeare created around 3,000! Charles Dickens too created some useful expressions like ‘round the clock’ and ‘boredom’. But creativity comes from knowledge. The more words you know, the greater your right to make up new ones.</p>.<p class="bodytext">By the way, everyone has a vocabulary. There’s a scale that goes from bad to fantastic depending on the number of words you know. 8,000 is a minimum for communication while about 25,000 could be considered good; and that’s in spite of the fact that the Oxford English Dictionary estimates that around 1,70,000 are in regular use!</p>.<p class="bodytext">However, I do think that adding words to your vocabulary should be fun. Reading of course, is the best way to do this and you don’t have to keep a dictionary beside you to look up every new word. Just go with the flow… you’ll figure it out! Reading, however, is a solitary activity and sometimes we like to do things with people. That’s where word games come in.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Do you play Wordle? It’s not very complicated and win or lose, it can’t take up too much of your time even on a busy day. For years now, the world seems to be playing it. No, you don’t need a great vocabulary to win. Wordle uses only 5-letter words after all and which English-speaking person doesn’t know quite a few of those? (There are 4 in the last sentence alone.) You’ve 6 tries to crack each word. I’ve been playing Wordle daily for a long while now and the only hiccup that I had was that spellings use ‘or’ (color) instead of ‘our’ (colour) and that doesn’t come naturally to me. So, I did a little digging. Wordle was invented by a Welshman called Wardle. Hah! Then why the American spelling? Well, he created the game for his American partner to help with Covid-time boredom!</p>.<p class="bodytext">Though the official NYT Wordle allows you only 1 word a day, there are myriad versions currently available that allow you as many as you like. But if you’re the competitive kind then only the original Wordle will work for you to compete with friends or family because that’s where everyone gets the same word, made available at the same time, for you to race everyone fair and square. Catching up in popularity is Quordle — Wordle multiplied by 4 with 9 tries to solve all 4 of the grids. Wordle on steroids you might say.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Let’s take a few steps back. The first word game I ever played was Scrabble. I was 6. The children’s version I had was brightly coloured and the board was small requiring far shorter words to get extra points. I loved it. I didn’t know at the time, that I was ‘building’ a vocabulary but learning is always more fun when you don’t think of it as ‘learning’. The elderly friend who taught me the game made sure that that was a well-kept secret.</p>.<p class="bodytext">In school, in my day, we used to play ‘name, place, animal, thing’ which involved writing down words in each column beginning with randomly chosen alphabets. Who thought that the more words you knew, the better your chances of winning.</p>.<p class="bodytext">And then there was Hangman. By this time, we did know that our man was most likely to hang if you didn’t guess the word fast enough!</p>.<p class="bodytext">But one of the most fun things that you can do with words is try your hand at writing limericks. Limericks are 5-line ‘poems’ that follow a particular rhyming pattern — aabba. In the old days most of these used to be pretty naughty but today, we like to make them funny. Edward Lear wrote a whole book on them called ‘A Book of Nonsense’:</p>.<p class="bodytext">There was an Old Man with a beard,</p>.<p class="bodytext">Who said, ‘It is just as I feared!</p>.<p class="bodytext">Two Owls and a Hen,</p>.<p class="bodytext">Four Larks and a Wren,</p>.<p class="bodytext">Have all built their nests in my beard!’</p>.<p class="bodytext">Here’s one that ChatGPT came up with:</p>.<p class="bodytext">Words can be tricky and fun,</p>.<p class="bodytext">They jump and they dance in the sun.</p>.<p class="bodytext">They rhyme and they play,</p>.<p class="bodytext">And help us to say,</p>.<p class="bodytext">The things that we think and have done!</p>.<p class="bodytext">Can you write one?</p>