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There were more like 48 that I didn't know, so I can only admire your range, Alastair. It was fun though. Mary On 14 Mar 2015, at 11:08, Alastair Wilson wrote: > I have just got enormous pleasure out of Professor Tom Pinney’s > article in the recent Journal (March 2015), on “Hard Words in > Kipling’s Poems”. And in line with his remark that many readers > “will know some of these words, but will any reader know all of > them? One may doubt”, I set out to test myself. > > Having read through the whole article, I had another quick(-ish) > skim through, and reckoned that I could say I knew 28 of the 93 > words, from sources other than Kipling himself. Then I started to > try and think about the ‘test’ analytically. > > How do we learn our vocabulary? (These are the maunderings of an > amateur – a professional linguist will no doubt have a better > answer). First of all, by being positively taught by our parents > (pointing to the family cat – “cat”, and so on): then by copying our > parents and others around us. Then by an extension of the first two > methods, at school from our teachers and fellow pupils. And then, > by our own efforts by Reading (the capital ‘R’ is deliberate, to > emphasise the importance). This, I suggest, is the primary way we > increase our vocabulary after we’ve absorbed the basic words which > enable us to get by in every-day life. The other means of > communication are not nearly so useful – they may introduce new > words to us, but we can’t say to the television presenter “What was > that you said? How do you spell that?” > > So it’s books, and dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri?) and > lexicon (lexicoi? – I never had much Greek), and, Praise be! they’re > all on line today (my County library subscribes to the OED, so all > Council Tax payers can get access to what Professor Tom has > described as an “almost unfailing resource”). I don’t even have to > walk across from my desk to a book shelf (and I wouldn’t have the > space for the OED anyway). > > Now, back to Kipling’s extended vocabulary, as revealed in his > verse. I regard myself as being pretty familiar with it – the > (never-really-was-and-certainly-isn’t-now) Definitive Edition has > been my companion, either on my bedside table, or in the book case > which has my ‘ready-use library’ – the old favourites which I’m > always consulting, or into which I like to dip from time to time – > for some sixty years. Despite my (assumed) familiarity with it, I > still find poems which I cannot ever recall reading, or which, if I > read, I didn’t bother to analyse word-by-word (and anyway, that’s > not the way to read poetry for pleasure). > > Therefore, I thought I’d tackle the problem of how many of Professor > Tom’s 93 words I could really claim to know, from the other end, by > seeing if I could determine how many I definitely did NOT know. I > came up with 37 unknowns. For one or two of them, the meaning was > clear from the context (“when the Cambrian measures were forming”); > (“Wot makes the soldier’s ‘eart to penk”); but the remainder really > were unknown. > > Then I went back to the ones I thought I really did know, and added > another nine words, making 37. Many of them, I could say with > certainty where I first encountered the word: for example, > “bink” (Adam Brunskill, by Thomas Armstrong); “Dromon(d)” (Gods, > Heroes and Men of Ancient Greece , by W H D Rouse); “Haulm” (my > father, telling me he wanted my help in clearing the potato haulms > off the two-acre field) “Patteran” (Swallowdale, by Arthur Ransome), > “rax” (Hubble-Bubble, by Bernard Fergusson); etc. > > A number of the words which Professor Tom found unusual, I knew > because of my Scottish/naval background (“Peel”, “Whitehead”). > > Finally, the indeterminates – arithmetic says that there are 19 of > them: such words as “Catafract”, of which the meaning is pretty > clear from the context. “Scough” is another. > > A fascinating exercise. Who else wants to have ago? >