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?