Count My Words
A couple of years ago a job recruiter asked me "What would be your perfect job?" With some wit, but unexpected precision, I responded: "One that requires a knowledge of partial differential equations." This does sum up pretty well the level of technical skill and experience that would have characterized a suitable position for me, but the recruiter seemed not to find it a very helpful description.
Yesterday I thought of another: "One that calls upon a large vocabulary." This came to me, naturally, while I was having lunch at the Taco Bell. I was listening to the assistant manager repeat an order to one of the food preparers, and it struck me that the vocabulary he used in the course of his day was rather restricted, and that one could work at a similar sort of job and get by with a rather small vocabulary.
How small, I wondered. Let's make a rough estimate. By my count roughly 40 words are enough to name all the menu items (including modifiers like "crunchy", "soft", "beef", or "chicken").* Add some more words concerning ingredients that might be added or left out — say a dozen and a half — and the verbs and whatnot to describe that — another two dozen. That brings the total to about 85 words. Then there's the vocabulary necessary for running the store itself, words about cleaning the dining room or using the cash register and other tasks. Let's be generous and imagine it could take as many as 200 words.
Even if I make a large engineering allowance for margin of error, what we're estimating is that a worker at Taco Bell should easily be able to get through all daily tasks with a vocabulary of less than 500 words. Even if we doubled it and said a 1,000 words, this is not an extensive vocabulary. But then, the various jobs at a typical Taco Bell are highly constrained and systematic, doing much the same tasks repeatedly with little variation hour to hour, day to day.
Other low-skill jobs would seem to have the same characteristic. I wonder how vocabulary sizes change from job type to job type, or across different professions? It suggests, though, that highly constrained jobs require smaller vocabularies, and one might conjecture that the broader the scope of the job, the larger the vocabulary that might be needed to accomplish its tasks. I'm sure further study is called for, but I digress.
Suppose I start then with the job requirement of needing a large vocabulary, what job would be best for me? That's a bit harder to come up with.
Writing, of course, suggests itself. Who seems likely to use more different words than a writer? Fiction, I think, would leave more scope for using interesting words than nonfiction. While it's true that technical disciplines, for instance, may have a jargon all their own, I suspect that professional papers published in those disciplines still use a relatively small subset of available vocabulary, even if some of it is highly specialized and impenetrable argot.
Fiction seems the way to go, since anything can in principle be written about in any way that works. Think of Shakespeare's famously large vocabulary of some 30,000 words. What scope!
Given my been-there-done-that personality, I tend to look for jobs with constantly shifting, novel tasks jobs where I never know from day to day what new challenge is going to present itself. And, at the moment, I'm certainly getting my quota of ever-new, ever-changing challenges as I try to get Ars Hermeneutica going. What scope! What frustrations! But what vocabulary!
Now that I think about it, perhaps this is the best type of work for me if I apply my job requirement of wishing to use a relatively larger vocabulary. I don't know whether that makes me feel any better about it or not.
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*I might claim this supports my contention that there are relatively few substances, arranged in several manners, that make up the available food there. Basically, choose some innards and decide how those innards will be wrapped up, and there aren't that many choices. This always leaves me scratching my head over how it is that some people can spend upwards of ten minutes consulting with their order-taker about their dining choices.
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on Thursday, 19 April 2007 at 00.16
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For putting an extensive vocabulary to good use and expanding it some, daily newspaper copy editor.
For putting an extensive vocabulary to good use and expanding it considerably, encyclopedia, dictionary and/or textbook editor.
Most fun variation, if you can pull it off: create a column for syndication about words and their meanings.
on Thursday, 19 April 2007 at 12.28
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Editing has always been on the fun side for me, although it can get tedious if I don't have other things to work on, too. Not to mention that editing is not noted for its lucrative rewards, alas.
The column idea has appeal, I must admit. The best idea I've come up with is for something I call "The Art of Conversation", 700-word essays on arcane and enlightening subjects; Isaac and I, between us, can cover a lot of ground when it comes to out-of-the-way topics.
on Thursday, 19 April 2007 at 16.04
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"Isaac and I, between us, can cover a lot of ground when it comes to out-of-the-way topics."
Understatement of the week. (Grin)
The art is in making them interesting, which you have an excellent way of doing.