A couple of passages from the Faulkner novel I'm reading, Intruder in the Dust, got me to ruminating about the extent of vocabulary usage and how many words we actually need to get by in everyday life, or to hold an intelligent conversation, or to write with enough authority to be deemed literate. I've known people, seemingly intelligent people, who have contoured their vocabularies over time so that they usually speak in a few dozen stock phrases, so much so that I can actually predict what they're going to say before they say it (for most of the time). But, strangely, this doesn't seem to dampen the beacon of their intelligence. When I was a boy and young man, the dictionary was always at my side as I swam though a sea of literature and non-fiction, and I wonder how many of those words I looked up actually adhered to my psyche and became a natural part of my discourse. But, since we're probably not focally cognizant of the words we're used to using, it's difficult to gauge by listening to yourself or reading your own writing how much your vocabulary has matured, or vice versa, over the years. I realize different levels of endeavor, such as science and academia, demand an expanded lexicon for a higher level of linguistic discourse, and that an average figure has been offered as the number of words in an average person's vocabulary. But how many words do we actually need to maintain an intelligent, civil discourse in the comings and goings of our daily work and lives? Should we settle for an average mean? A certain personal plateau? A jointly accepted amalgam of words and phrases? Is this really enough to capture our ideas and thoughts, and to express them, ideas both common and of novel proportions? Or should we ever strive to expand vocabulary (I guess most of us here are in this "ballpark" ) to nurture the expansion and growth of linguistic usage, and so heighten the nuance, vitality, and beauty of language? I never "write down" to an audience (to people), as they say. But I know, more often than not, I find myself tailoring my spoken language to fit the situations and people I'm among. Is this fair to them? Is this fair to myself? (I know there's been some reflection on this in comment along the way, but I searched vocabulary, and found no threads or extended conversation about it). Here are the Faulknerian passages that inspired these ponderings:

'Maybe they'll decide to stay at home on a Sunday night,' his uncle said pleasantly, passing on: whereupon the man said almost exactly what the man in the barbershop had said this morning (and he remembered his uncle saying once how little of vocabulary man really needed to get comfortably and even efficiently through his life, how not only within the individual but within his whole type and race and kind a few simple clichés served his few simple passions and needs and lusts):

Wm Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, pg. 47, par. 3

"And now too. But he still tried. 'But just suppose----' he said again and now he heard for the third time almost exactly what he had heard twice in twelve hours, and he marvelled again at the paucity, the really almost standardized meagreness not of individual vocabularies but of Vocabulary itself, by means of which even man can live in vast droves and herds even in concrete warrens in comparative amity: even his uncle too:"

Wm Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, pg. 80 par. 3