How Many Different Words Do You Speak on an Average Day? A Thousand? Hundred Thousand? Perhaps You're a Wordy Millionaire?
Tom Madden, Founder & CEO, TransMedia Group
Or are you like Eliza in the musical “My Fair Lady” so sick of words words words and you use them sparingly as possible to get what you want out of life? Or like Eliza remonstrates:
Don't talk of stars burning above; If you're in love, show me!
Some Americans have a working daily vocabulary of only around 20,000 to 40,000 words out of a total more than 172,000 available in English. Languages like Portuguese that my Brazilian wife Rita speaks have even a more voluminous vocabulary, especially when she’s excited or angry.
When Rita de Cassia Pierotti first came to America, she said she got lots of mileage out of just the few words she spoke at the time she arrived here.
One was “get,” which helped her get going on the road to speaking fluent English that today she reels out like a professor of elocution at Harvard. Yesterday she was “appalled” at something I had said.
But upon her arrival here she remembers inordinately using one small word “get,” which she said helped her to get around.
Get me this . . . get that . . . get out . . . I get it . . . get lost!
So, what’s the average number of words we Americans speak each day? To me, it’s an intriguing question. Why?
I get it!
It’s because I make a living using words. Being in the PR business, I write them endlessly in articles and news releases, in media pitches and even books, like my latest due out soon called Wordshine Man about how you can polish words and sentences to make your writing more inviting!
I try my best to use words to accomplish goals like getting behemoth newspapers like The New York Times to write a story about one of my client’s booming businesses, or convince a TV producer a client is worthy of an interview on NBC TODAY.
Actually, the NY TIMES once printed speeches I wrote for a top executive at Kellogg’s Company in which I pleaded to the FTC not to break up the top three breakfast cereal companies they were calling a word that was strange to me at the time--oligopoly. I wrote that it was a very unkind word to call poor Tony the Tiger.
And once on the TODAY Show I arranged an appearance by Venus the cat, which had a face of two colors, but she was very closed-mouthed with words. One half of her face was solid black with a green eye, the other half was typical orange tabby stripes and a blue eye.
The appearance resulted in a lucrative deal for my client, the cat’s owner, to make a fluffy toy out of Venus with that now famous face.
Another play with words was a book I wrote titled “King of the Condo,” now slowly making the rounds in Hollywood toward becoming a TV series based on “A hilarious whodunit with an ocean view.”
The book is about inciting words the main character Ed Malardi uses during his volatile term as the beleaguered president of a Florida condo. He keeps getting into hot water with condo commandoes with inflammatory words, especially this one, “assessment!” That hateful word drives residents wild enough to fire shots at him and even attempt to run him over with a beach tractor.
His besieged character sort of reminds you of our poor beleaguered President Biden presiding over a frustratingly long pandemic, during which he gets a backlash using inflammatory words like “mandate,” then his messy Buster Keaton-like high-tailing out of Kabul and now thanks to Russian savagery our soaring inflation and gas prices going through our car roofs.
Yes, words. They can cause a lot of trouble, but we can’t live without them.
Right, Shakespeare? Shakespeare is credited with creating many words that we still use in our daily speech – some frequently like accommodation, aerial, amazement, apostrophe, assassination, auspicious, baseless, bloody, bump, castigate and many more!
So, let’s not castigate, but appreciate words, the more we use the merrier, without being wordy!
About the Author: Besides a veteran blogger, Tom Madden is a former journalist and an author of countless published articles and five books, including his latest, WORDSHINE MAN, available April on Amazon. He is the founder and CEO of TransMedia Group, an award-winning public relations firm serving clients worldwide since 1981 and has conducted remarkably successful media campaigns and crisis management for America’s largest companies and organizations.
