I've been desperately scrabbling around in my old Adult Literacy Teaching packs for an article which gave an extremely low figure for the number of words needed to communicate effectively in ordinary, day-to-day life. It was over 100, but well under 200.

I amazed, Rhuby...I would never have guessed that figure to be so low for day-to-day speech!

And about your joke-telling...as long as those punch-lines don't change! But, really, did you ever ruin a favorite joke by screwing up the punch-line and/or the set-up? I hate when that happens, but somehow I do it more often than not over the years, usually jokes I haven't told often. Seems that improvisational linguistic imaging doesn't work as well for set jokes as for storytelling, huh?