Wednesday, September 8, 2010

ESP(English Speaking People)

Some of us as English speaking citizens know very less about words and their usage. Most words learnt serve us very little purpose. We continue using the same words even after our adolescence. This is where our growth stops. We ought to realize that words are thinking vehicles and we need to learn more from them and learn them well if we are to substitute our lazy thinking with a spurt of new thinking. Very few of us know what the names of things we carry daily are. A beautiful list is given on the net as ‘Visual dictionary’. It contains nearly 6000 items and names of most of them are strangers to us. When caught up with spectacles, there were types of eye-glasses like the monocles,half glasses,scissors- glasses and the parts of the specs like bridge, rim, lens, nose pad, pad plate etc.

To improve naming things we need to study them so that we can express them clearly. It also increases our knowledge and we can communicate well with other people. In our normal conversation while indicating to these words we use our fingers pointing towards them or use language by trying to circumlocute towards the object without knowing the word.

It is more important to study these words rather than working towards words that are generally given in exams like SAT. These exams test your Latin word strength which we seldom use in our daily conversation. These words are good for writing on advanced topics, but for our day to day easy language we need not learn them. We cannot challenge what is asked in such exams but we can be aware that we need not give more importance to such words in our daily lives but restrict it purely for exam purposes. Agreed, that one must not be partial towards using words, but one must realize that these words we don’t know never seem to appear in our daily banter.

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