Why Erudition Is in Freefall

Commentary

Last week I was looking for an evocative word that meant dark, dangerous, ominous, threatening, with a kind of overlay of a scene or environment. I knew such a word existed because I had used it before. I could not recall it.

You know this tip-of-the-tongue feeling. It’s frustrating. I tried every tool to find this word. It appeared nowhere and so I gave up and settled on some poor substitute. It still bugged me that a word had gone missing from my vocabulary.

Somehow, however implausibly, the word appeared before me yesterday. Did you already guess it? The word is macabre. It has three syllables and is pronounced muh-KAH-bruh. If you heard it in a sentence, you would intuitively know what it means.

It is apparently derived from reference to the Hebrew book of Maccabees, a people martyred for refusing to give up their faith. It is referenced in the medieval allegory “Danse Macabre” in which a skeleton or corpse representing death leads people of every rank—pope, emperor, peasant—in a procession to the grave. It is a moral reminder that death comes for everyone.

How macabre!

So there we go. Frustrated that I once knew the word and then forgot it, I started to wonder how many other vocabulary words have gone missing in my brain. Sure, you could chalk it up to age but I suspect that there is more going on here. Digital media in general and the self-contained nature of even shopping means more social isolation than we had in the past. With less routine contact with others, we have less use for words than we once did.

They say with muscles that you have to use them or lose them. I certainly know this to be true. When tennis season comes back, my body has to rekindle and restore muscle groupings that slightly atrophied over the winter. It’s true when going back to the gym. You are stressing muscles your body forgot that it had.

It might be the same with words. You have to use them or risk losing them. If we are isolated, speak ever less with others, and are more rarely called upon to pronounce a diversity of vocabulary in front of others, we would expect to see a real decline. This is clearly what is happening now.

One only needs to listen to the typical podcast. The diminution of erudition now as compared with the past is alarming. It hurts my ears to hear people who imagine themselves to be influencers unable to form English sentences and randomly sticking the word “like” into their ramblings for no apparent reason.

We all have our verbal ticks. Some years ago, I developed a problem with “You know” and it only goes away when I concentrate on it. It comes and goes in waves. There are other phrases that have become ubiquitous: um / uh / er, so, well, I mean, I guess, right?, you know what I mean, anyway, honestly, I feel like, at the end of the day, basically, actually, literally, pretty much, going forward, really, super, totally.

This is all filler, nonsense talk to substitute for proper and precise word choices.

And let’s not dig too deeply into the mile-high piles of baloney verbiage that mark corporate life today. Later we can circle back, touch base, close the loop, unpack that, drill down, move the needle, think outside the box, and get on the same page. None of it means anything. It’s the verbal equivalent of scrawls in a cave. You have to guess the meaning if there is any there.

What if we have done this to the English language because we went for a few years in verbal isolation with the urge to stay home, stay safe, stand six feet away, cover our mouths, and never gather with others? It might well have been a conspiracy to reduce the vocabulary of ourselves and others.

I am certain this has happened to me. I’m working on rebuilding.

Lately, I’ve started to make a list of words I had forgotten and then remembered, in hopes that this will cause me to retain them. On this list already is sepulchral, saturnine, lugubrious, taciturn, avuncular, mercurial, inchoate, inscrutable, tautological, unctuous, and quotidian. These are words I want to use regularly not because they are fancy but because they are evocative and precise.

We have vast evidence that the lockdowns reduced vocabulary in children and surely adults too.

• Frontiers in Psychology (2023): “Those participants with more frequent lockdown episodes and less opportunities for socio-communicative diversity showed lower expressive vocabulary scores.”
• Scientific Reports (2024): A scoping review found “consistent evidence of disruption in the early language environment, with particular concerns raised about delays in vocabulary growth.”
• PMC Study on Greek Preschoolers: “Reduced social interactions and exposure to language-rich environments negatively impacted vocabulary acquisition and expressive language skills.”
• BBC/Future Reporting: Researchers found “children who were babies during the pandemic have fewer words and may struggle more with higher-level thinking skills.”
• Passport Health: “More screen time yielded slower vocabulary growth in infants and toddlers.”

Now consider an alarming report from researchers that came out in April 2026, appearing in Perspectives on Psychological Science. The study documents that in general we are speaking 338 fewer words every day. This pattern is getting worse. Our dictionary is shrinking. “As trivial as 338 words a day may feel,” the study says, “the loss of these daily spoken words unavoidably adds up. It means that, each year, we speak more than 120,000 words fewer than in the previous year.”

Yikes… I mean concerning.

We also know that face-to-face interaction increases vocabulary because this is how we learn to use words, particularly if children are around adults and adults are around other adults who are linguistically aspirational.

Ever been around homeschool kids? Their vocabulary is tremendously advanced over their public-school counterparts. This is not because the schools are bad but because homeschoolers interact more with kids with a range of ages and more adults too. We have siloed kids in their own age group and blocked opportunities to learn from experiencing a broadened and more mature social group.

It happens with adults too. You notice when watching podcasts how guests will often mirror or even mimic, however inadvertently, the language and vocabulary patterns of the host, probably in an effort to ingratiate themselves. It’s understandable but we should be aware.

I’ve seen this at dinner parties where a prestigious guest has an unusual accent, like high English or French. Other adults just slightly bend their language in a way that matches that of the valorized guest. It’s funny until it is not. The trajectory can be toward better or worse erudition depending on environmental stimuli.

Lockdowns siloed the adults too, with an obvious result. Erudition has plummeted. I feel it. I’m struggling to remember what I once knew. One way I’ve learned to improve is to play word games with friends, using unusual words and asking them to do the same, while sharing definitions. It makes for great and fun conversation out of which we learn something.

Using a more complex vocabulary isn’t about showing off; it’s about becoming more civilized. We are clearly going the opposite direction.

We can fight this trend. Get out. Join a supper club. Have friends for dinner. Chat it up with everyone you encounter at stores or anywhere when out and about. We have to do this. We need this. It will improve us all so that we develop or recover social skills and the language necessary for them. Otherwise we are in danger of becoming brutes scrawling emojis on digital platforms like cavemen.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.