To All Presenters:
It has been claimed the average vocabulary of 6 to 14 year olds is currently 10,000 words, a decline from 25,000 words in 1945. Allegedly the sources for these two stats were a book by Henry Rinsland and an unrelated report by Gary Ingersoll.
Reviewing 100,000 student compositions containing six million words total, Rinsland recorded 25,632 distinct words in the sample.
However, according to popular debunker website "The Straight Dope.com" - in 1984 Ingersoll conducted a similar study, but its sample was much smaller, just 5,000 students and half a million words total. With a sample size one twelth of the Rinsland study one would expect a far lower word count. And using rough estimates derived from the American Heritage Word Frequency Book, a 500,000 word sample should have around 60% fewer unique words than a six-million word sample regardless of vocabulary size. Coincidentally, the Ingersoll study reported the aforementioned 10,000 words, (10,265 to be exact) which is about 60% fewer compared to the results of Rinsland's study.
Ingersoll never paired his figures with Rinsland's results. A journalist somewhere along the line (I found references to this stat in Harpers Index, the New York Times and other publications) combined the two numbers and thus birthed an urban legend demonstrating society's linguistic decline. In fact, it is claimed Ingersoll has said he tried to set the record straight on past occasions to no avail. So as Mark Twain once said truly, "there are lies, damned lies and statistics."
Now, this stat may be garbage, but the jury is still out on our declining vocabularies.
To wit:
i can't blieve i had 2 explain 2 some1 that this is not the way 2 rite email 4 work . LOL!
THE POINT: Statistics aside? If this evidence of things to come, I think we might be screwed.
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