For some weeks now, I have been obsessed by the “Polygon”
puzzle, in the appropriately named “MindGames” section of The Times newspaper. The aim is simple enough – create as many
words as possible from a ring of seven to nine letters, while always including
a further letter in the centre of the ring.
This is simple enough, but the rules The Times impose on the puzzle drive me to distraction. Your words
must be of a minimum length (usually three or four letters), and must be listed
in the Oxford Concise English Dictionary. They must also not be capitalised
words or proper nouns, plurals, comparatives or superlatives, adverbs ending in
-ly, or be a conjugated verb – I can say I “hate” these rules, but I can’t say
I “hated” them. Even worse, your results are given a rating. For example, if
you find twelve words, that could be “average,” with 17 listed as “good,” 22 as
“very good,” and 28 as “excellent.”
I know I have enough of a vocabulary to make myself
understood, and nothing is more important to me than being understood, but these
rules are enough to sow some doubt. If my final score breaks through the “average”
level into “good,” that is a cause for celebration. On the other hand, there is
an enormous difference between how many words you know, and the number you would
actually use yourself.
Trying a test on the site testyourvocab.com, part of an
American-Brazilian research project, reveals I have a vocabulary approximated
at 32,200 words, within the adult average of 20,000-35,000 words. However, with
the test asking how much fictional literature I read, and my answering “not
much” (well, not when compared to non-fiction anyway), the message is that
those who try to learn the meaning of one new word every day might be better
served by reading a Stephen King novel instead, where the use of language is
more important.
Learning a new language exposes how many words are actually
needed to be “fluent”. Basic English, developed in the 1930s as an aid for
teaching English as a second language, has a beginner’s vocabulary of only 850
words, before expanding to a general list of 2,000 words (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Basic_English_combined_wordlist).
Looking at this list, I can only see what I am not likely to use – “chauffeur,”
“cognac,” “suchlike,” and what the hell is an “overshoe,” apart from the bottom
of a trouser leg?
The only lessons to take from this exercise is to always have
the right tools to say what you want to say, read as much as you can, and stop
doing word puzzles in newspapers.
[In case anyone started the puzzle at the beginning of this
article, here are the results. There are no ratings for how well you do, and the
only rules I am imposing are a minimum of four letters, with no proper nouns: ceil,
ceric, cering, cicely, cine, circle, cire, clergy, cleric, cline, cling, clinger,
clingy, crine, cringe, cringle, crying, cycle, cycler, cycling, cynic, genic,
glyceric, glycine, lice, lyric, nice, nicely, nicer, recycling, relic, rice.]
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