Читать книгу The Communication Playbook - Teri Kwal Gamble - Страница 172

The English language contains over 1 million words, and a new word enters the vocabulary about every 98 minutes. In 2015, the Oxford Dictionaries named as its “word of the year” an emoji titled “face with tears of joy.” They say that for the first time they recognized a pictograph as word of the year because of the symbol’s ability to transcend linguistic borders.² In 2016, their new word of the year was post-truth—a term signifying that appeals to emotion and personal belief are more important than objective facts when it comes to being able to influence us. A contender, but not the winner, was chatbot—a computer program that engages in conversation with human users.³ What do these choices say about the value we place on words or verbal language?

We depend on words to help us share meaning. By understanding how language works, we can improve our ability to do that. In this chapter, we define language and explore the roots of miscommunication. We consider how aspects of our society affect our word choices and conclude with guidelines for developing our ability to make word choices that help others understand us. Although most Americans know about 20,000 words, each of us actually uses only about 7,500 of them on any given day.⁴ On what basis do we choose our words? And what happens when we select the wrong ones?