I have a proclivity for ten-dollar words (which you could say renders me either a sesquipedalian or prone to grandiloquence). Hear me out: I love language and want to have a wide range of sounds and forms in my arsenal when writing. So many words have fallen out of the popular lexicon that have fantastic potential for adding more feet and tones to meter and rhyme.

It’s no secret that American vocabularies are dwindling. Although educational attainment in terms of years spent in school has gone up since the 1970s, the number of words we know and use frequently has been on a long and steady decline. I aver that vocabulary is at least partially reflective of environment and experience, and that over time the space we inhabit and the time we spend interacting with it have both changed. Some words are understandably unknown by many because of their utility only in specialized settings: for example, stipple (or stippling) is a great word that generally only a painter would use.

What we see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and ponder regularly necessarily impacts the words we need to know. As human beings have become increasing indoor creatures, and of late smart device creatures, our words have changed in tandem. Fundamental changes to the nature of our quotidian experience may explain, in part, why our language skills flounder as the number of people graduating high school and going on to higher education increases. We may also note the neurodevelopmental data that implies a link between early exposure to reading/writing in the familial environment to better vocabulary growth later in life. (N.B., access to full scientific articles may require a login). That infants and children perform better with linguistic skills later in life based on their early exposure to reading as well as adults (particularly caregivers) modeling literacy behaviors is compelling, even with other important variables such as genetics are socioeconomic status are controlled. Experience and interactivity with language, other people, and the environment are integral to our adult lexicon and perspicacity with words.

To circle back to the environment as teacher of words, we might ask how the language of a people accustomed to being indoors and online for so much of their lives has evolved from an earlier state where their existence was dramatically different. An obvious consideration is that new technologies create words that previous generations would never have known (not one soul on Earth knew the word “emoji” in the year 1926). Seemingly, the lexicon increases. However, as new words become de rigueur old words fall away. The evolution of language mirrors the development of new technology and the cultures and customs that sprout up around it. When automobiles were invented, a glut of new words entered popular usage while many others, say those around the horse and carriage, became more arcane. These days only an equestrian uses the language of travel by horse that was probably very common a century and a half ago.

Is it such a bad thing? Words, like tools, have their time and place; if few people use the word “farrier” anymore is it that much skin off anyone’s back? If we regress that question a bit to a more primitive form, we may find ourselves wondering how much specialized language is needed at all. The tension I think is between opposing views of what purpose language serves: if it is only to communicate brute information, then things could be simplified enormously. Human history attests to another use for words. Yes, to express ideas and feelings, but for more complex things like storytelling, poetry, and music as well. Though each to some degree served a survival/propagation need in the past, they also do a bit more: they give life for sentient beings its sweetness. They spur the imagination and offer the power to weave ideas with greater nuance and elegance. Language is edification beyond the rote hunting-gathering-reproducing reptilian brain.

Do we need the language of our forbears to survive? As a hiker and naturalist, I mourn the loss of the language of forests – that dells, and hollows, and rills, windsnaps and bowers aren’t things regularly discussed. I will also confess that there’s little utility in these words for an animal that spends about 87% of its time indoors and another 5-6% in a motor vehicle. Still, is it not good to hold an army of words in reserve for the things that go beyond communication alone, that is, to express transcendental ideas, or to fashion a beautiful thing like a poem or a song, or to harness the power of stories?

I’ve tried to avoid a diatribe against mobile devices and new technologies here. Nevertheless, if experience forges languages and human experience is now more limited, I wonder if the decline in vocabulary – which, to be sure, was happening before the advent of the Internet – is in part an effect of social media and people spending so much time on smart phones. How meaningful and salubrious social media interactions and cell phone scrolling are is still a topic of debate, though almost all of the evidence to date is cause for great alarm. Evidence is mixed on the impact a larger vocabulary has on adult learning tasks, though existing publications suggest they are faster with comprehension and word recall. A larger vocabulary also facilitates the expression of shades of difference – to be happy, for example, is not the same as to be elated or enraptured. (Many words came about to express difference in degree, scale, form, or function. Reasonably, those who wield a wider vocabulary are better at communicating subtle differences.)

I’m in the position of a poet and writer; consider me biased on this matter. Rarely, however, have I met a person who wasn’t inclined to love discovering a new word. (A writer friend was delighted, recently, upon learning the word mawkish from a poem of mine.) If the argument that cell phone use has decreased language skills seems obvious, I think the more important point is that there are good reasons to increase our fluency beyond the usefulness of words as vehicles for blunt information. Data and raw facts do not change minds, but stories and poems do.

And, after all, a river and a rill are not the same thing.