On Tue, March 26, 2013 16:08, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

I dunno - I don't think I was telling him to learn latin; rather, that he should increase his vocabulary beyond, oh, I read, years back, that the *average* American's *average* vocabulary was about 500 words... and that Koko the gorilla had 550 in ASL....

   mark "eep, eep"

The median adult native English with high-school education has about 11,000 stem words from which perhaps 40-50k derivative words are formed. Technical jargon aside, one only requires about 6000 root words to comprehend the essence of approximately 90% of all written English text.

A native English speaker acquires about three new stem words per day or over 2500 per year.

But, evidently one may be a boor with any size vocabulary.