lexicon
All this fuss about words
Deepti

Play a while

When people try to learn a new language, they tend to grumble a lot. One pet peeve against English is that it has 26 alphabets but 44 sounds; hence coordination between the two is tough! But, such grumblers should look around and check out the other languages before crying about their plight. Cambodian has 72 alphabets, Thai has 59 and Punjabi has 42!

Learn a little

Children acquire the first language they speak, they don’t learn it. Acquisition refers to the process whereby one day you just begin to use a language without any conscious effort at all. Children are born with the faculty to use language but the specific language comes to them by living in an environment where it is used. A toddler observes and learns and one fine day, begins to speak! As adults, if we get sufficient exposure to a language and begin to pick it up, we can learn it faster as compared to our pace in a classroom. So, be childlike and open to influence and you will learn faster!

Intriguing words

Just like men and women, words, too, are known by the company they keep. While collocation is a usual pattern in most languages as in ‘black coffee’ or ‘bright day’, often words tend to get stale in the same kind of company. Then, they get to be called ‘clichés’. Some of the clichés from the past year are: at the end of the day, fairly unique, I personally feel/think, at this moment in time, with all due respect, absolutely true, 24/7 and it’s not rocket science.

Precise usage

‘Suitable’ and ‘suited’ are words to be used in different contexts. For instance, when the sentence reads ‘The film is not suitable for children’ it means to express the fact that the film is not appropriate for a particular purpose. But when the sentence is ‘His interest in automobiles makes him better suited to an engineering course’ it means that someone or something has the appropriate requirement for a specific goal.