It’s not obvious to me that the story is “some people have great vocabulary because they learn obscure words that they’ve only seen once or twice” rather than “some people have great vocabulary because they spend a lot of time reading books (or being in spaces) where obscure words are used a lot, and therefore they have seen those obscure words much more than once or twice”. Can you think of evidence one way or the other?
(Anecdotal experience: I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times. I feel like I got a lot of my non-technical vocab from reading The Economist magazine every week in high school, they were super into pointlessly obscure vocab at the time (maybe still, but I haven’t read it in years).)
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all. If that was the sole determinant, you would then expect any vocab test to fail catastrophically and not predict/discriminate in most of the population (which would have downstream consequences like making SATs weirdly unreliable outside the elite colleges or much less predictive validity for low-performing demographics, the former of which I am unaware of being true and the latter of which I know is false); this would further have the surprising consequence that if a vocab test is, say, r = 0.5 with g while failing catastrophically on most of the population, it would have to be essentially perfectly correlated r = 1 in the remainder to even be arithmetically possible, which just punts the question: how did two book-readers come away from that book with non-overlapping vocabs...?
I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times.
For example, I’m sure I’ve looked up what “rostral” means 20 times or more since I started in neuroscience a few years ago. But as I write this right now, I don’t know what it means. (It’s an anatomical direction, I just don’t know which one.) Perhaps I’ll look up the definition for the 21st time, and then surely forget it yet again tomorrow. :)
What else? Umm, my attempt to use Anki was kinda a failure. There were cards that I failed over and over and over, and then eventually got fed up and stopped trying. (Including “rostral”!) I’m bad with people’s names—much worse than most people I know. Stuff like that.
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all…
If we’re talking about “most people”, then we should be thinking about the difference between e.g. SAT verbal 500 versus 550. Then we’re not talking about words like inspissate, instead we’re talking about words like prudent, fastidious, superfluous, etc. (source: claude). I imagine you come across those kinds of words in Harry Potter and Tom Clancy etc., along with non-trashy TV shows.
I don’t have much knowledge here, and I’m especially clueless about how a median high-schooler spends their time. Just chatting :)
It’s not obvious to me that the story is “some people have great vocabulary because they learn obscure words that they’ve only seen once or twice” rather than “some people have great vocabulary because they spend a lot of time reading books (or being in spaces) where obscure words are used a lot, and therefore they have seen those obscure words much more than once or twice”. Can you think of evidence one way or the other?
(Anecdotal experience: I have good vocabulary, e.g. 800 on GRE verbal, but feel like I have a pretty bad memory for words and terms that I’ve only seen a few times. I feel like I got a lot of my non-technical vocab from reading The Economist magazine every week in high school, they were super into pointlessly obscure vocab at the time (maybe still, but I haven’t read it in years).)
Most people do not read many books or spend time in spaces where SAT vocab words would be used at all. If that was the sole determinant, you would then expect any vocab test to fail catastrophically and not predict/discriminate in most of the population (which would have downstream consequences like making SATs weirdly unreliable outside the elite colleges or much less predictive validity for low-performing demographics, the former of which I am unaware of being true and the latter of which I know is false); this would further have the surprising consequence that if a vocab test is, say, r = 0.5 with g while failing catastrophically on most of the population, it would have to be essentially perfectly correlated r = 1 in the remainder to even be arithmetically possible, which just punts the question: how did two book-readers come away from that book with non-overlapping vocabs...?
How could you possibly know something like that?
For example, I’m sure I’ve looked up what “rostral” means 20 times or more since I started in neuroscience a few years ago. But as I write this right now, I don’t know what it means. (It’s an anatomical direction, I just don’t know which one.) Perhaps I’ll look up the definition for the 21st time, and then surely forget it yet again tomorrow. :)
What else? Umm, my attempt to use Anki was kinda a failure. There were cards that I failed over and over and over, and then eventually got fed up and stopped trying. (Including “rostral”!) I’m bad with people’s names—much worse than most people I know. Stuff like that.
If we’re talking about “most people”, then we should be thinking about the difference between e.g. SAT verbal 500 versus 550. Then we’re not talking about words like inspissate, instead we’re talking about words like prudent, fastidious, superfluous, etc. (source: claude). I imagine you come across those kinds of words in Harry Potter and Tom Clancy etc., along with non-trashy TV shows.
I don’t have much knowledge here, and I’m especially clueless about how a median high-schooler spends their time. Just chatting :)