Unless you're reading a newspaper from the last 5 years or so - in which case, the word "bathroom" becomes surprisingly more relevant.
Linguists have resorted to spying on people in parks and shops and restaurants, to get "natural" language unperturbed by observer effects, audience tailoring, the filter of writing, etc. (In most cases that would not be considered ethical today!)
The gold standard is something like: get acculturated to the language community you wish to study, make some acquaintances and friends, somehow finagle an invite to their homes or workplaces or social venues, and then with their permission, record their conversations as unobtrusively as you can.
There is so little data on how language is really used it is quite bedevilling. As soon as people know you are listening they change how they speak.
Hence the common phrase, found in most language phrasebooks: “is that a linguist hiding behind that bush?”
Ever wonder who decides what's self-explanatory and what resonates?
For reasons unknown to me, instead of using the word with the meaning they probably are trying to convey, they rather use vague analogies or metaphors.
It always made me question if Americans in contrast to the British are a bit afraid to be precise.
I don't think there is a fear of being imprecise. If anything, it is a fear of speaking plainly as boring.
This is not specific to "Americans". Learn any language and you will have the same impression, and experience the same gulf between textbook usage and everyday usage.
Of course, American corporate-speak is unique from normal conversations, and people intentionally use vagueness to make sure there's general agreement before saying something concretely that might be contentious or cause problems.
This is more corporate/middle class.
There's also a working class register which is very direct and sweary, and extreme insults are actually meant affectionately.
Even more confusingly, the two can overlap, and the same people will switch between them - sometimes in the same setting - with relative equals.
Americans don't seem to do understatement. "My business died" becomes "My incredible journey." Relationships are cross-bred with hustle, so you can be friends with someone and they'll ask you to invest in their MLM scheme.
Instead of using understatement US corporate speaks uses noise to act out hierarchy, to gaslight and to misdirect.
I was talking to someone today who was asked to produce a report. They sent it on time, and then the team lead called a meeting to ask why it hadn't arrived.
The report was literally sitting in their inbox unread. Everyone could see it, but they all went through the motions of pretending it wasn't there and developing an action plan for future delivery.
It's all very David Graeber. So far as I can tell the US seems to specialise in situations where corporate insanity is happening but the sharp edges have been filed off, so it looks like productive activity higher up the pyramid.
Brits say this all the time because they assume we talk like people in movies and interviews do (or they interpret corporate-speak as how Americans actually talk). We use understatement plenty. In fact, the "interesting idea" understatement? I wouldn't even clock it as British because we use that in the US, too. I would say it is a classic example we use here of how you politely call an idea stupid. "Hm, interesting." We don't usually say "that's a stupid idea." That would be extremely rude.
I encounter this same attitude vis a vis Brits and sarcasm. "Oh, Americans don't get sarcasm." We absolutely do get sarcasm (insert claim Brits are being sarcastic when they say we don't get it). Britain is not special in this regard. It boggles the mind why Brits think we don't understand it. The languages are not so far gone.
I tell ya what, "understatement of the year" was not a phrase coined to describe something a Brit said.
You also find observers outside the Anglosphere describing understatement not as a British thing, but an anglophonic thing, including in American speech. https://www.identitytheory.com/anna-wierzbickas-english-mean...
I would go so far as to say that the hedges famous to American English opinion sharing is an example of understatement. "I feel like XYZ" is an Americanism, and it's understatement to the point of re-catorizing a fact as an opinion in order to soften your speech.
I can't tell you the number of times I've heard a Texan describe extremely hot weather as "a bit warm."
Examples abound.
(We also bust balls with our friends, and it lines up with class the same way you describe, including code switching between two registers.)
That is surreal.
I see what you did there!
I'm willing to bet it's a combination of two factors:
1. you are consuming these things in English, and English natives are less likely to say "English has this word that those other people don't" because they fully understand English so it doesn't seem inscrutable, but some other language is kind of "magical an mysterious" to them. See, e.g., the urban legend that the Chinese word for crisis is "danger" and "opportunity." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_word_for_crisis There's a whole cottage industry around "that foreign language is so cool compared to English"
2. "this language can say X but another language cannot" is invariably wrong
So 3–8%.
Nothing to do with pretention and everything to do with impossibility :D
I live and work in a foreign country, and have a modest but functional grasp of the language here. Which is to say, I know how to say 'sustainability', 'union-negotiated collective agreement', and 'offensive conduct in the workplace'.... but if you asked me the words for 'cedar', 'robin', 'pond', or 'linen' I would be struck dumb. And yet presumably every ten year old I walk past in the street would know those words as comfortably as I knew them in English as a ten year old in England.
Just earlier I was talking to them, trying to say "when life gives you lemons" and being unable to find an equivalent phrase. I hope they understood my lemons reference regardless.
Also, both because of the familiarity and how English form words, English assign very specific non-compound words to them (rather than "xxx tree/bird"), making it more difficult for people from a completely different language family to learn them.
But of course this is not only English. In Chinese a child is taught to act 孝 (filial piety, respect and obedience to parents) and know how your uncles 舅 (mother's brother) 伯 (father's elder brother) 叔 (father's younger brother) relate to your parents. I'm sure it's OK for a foreign learner not to master them.
They likely show up in Western works a lot because they’re mentioned in the bible a good bit.
Indeed. I'm American but my family has spoken German in the USA uninterrupted for 200 years. I speak German with my kids. But there's a children's song called Alle Vögel sind schon da and another called die Vogelhochzeit that I listen to with my kids, and it's just a litany of bird species I do not know but, being in a kid's song, I assume means they are common words for German kids.
When I look them up, the English words are ones I've heard and know from context are birds, but I couldn't tell you what they are like, and I would never use the word in English when asked about birds. My go-tos would be mockingbird, cardinal, hummingbird...ones I see in my backyard and have seen my entire life.
I was in my 30s when I learned "ennui" was pronounced "on wee" rather than N-U-I. I did not know it was from French. No shame. I never spoke the word aloud, but used it in writing. A teenager I knew was studying for a vocab test and had to learn the word, and I overheard him flash carding. Pronounced it "on-wee" and my brain exploded.
Copying lyrics from my favorite songs of the 80s was helpful. And then later on TV series and movies in english.
I've watched Friends, HIMYM and Californication* more than once (it's probably the reason I swear so much) and those really helped.
Now I raised my kid in english: from the beginning she was only ever allowed to watch TV shows in english. And she's always been to international schools, in english too.
The other day she taught me a simply word which, surprisingly enough, I didn't know: a "coaster" (a drink coaster).
My absolute favorite is when she uses english grammar and applies it to french: the rules about where adjectives do go vary between french and english and she regularly messes it up in french (supposedly her "native" language but at this point I wonder whether english ain't a first language, and french second).
And one thing she has that I'll never have is a beautiful, proper, english accent. Mine shall forever be a strong french one.
A French accent in English is easy to mock but it actually sounds pretty good. My American accent in Spanish sounds atrocious and sadly our bilingual kids have pretty American accents too. But honestly who cares?
Speaking another language is the best effort I have ever made (I am lucky not to do it out of necessity). Totally changed my world view and how I think, speak, read and dream. Though please do not make me listen to a recording of my own voice…
I was pretty confident in my English but I couldn't understand half of the sentences since I didn't know any of the vocabulary related to cooking. From tools (spatula) to ingredients (parsley) or even actions (frying). My delusions of proficiency shattered as I found out my everyday vocabulary is smaller than an elementary schooler.
1. TV vocabulary is 2,000 words
2. High school vocabulary is 10,000 words
3. College vocabulary is 30,000 words
4. English language has 1,000,000 words
This is good news - you can be proficient in a foreign language by learning only 2,000 words!
The other people at work soon picked those lines up, and we used them regularly amongst ourselves. I still use them decades later!
Depends what you mean by "proficient". I currently know ~6k Spanish words and would hesitate to self-apply that word. Others might, but damn languages are hard.
Why? Having spent a good amount of time living in Shanghai, I found it important to be able to understand menus. But there's no pressure to know the words for supermarket items; you can just go to the supermarket and look for the item.
Otherwise your point is correct; all semantic words are equally difficult and which ones you know depends on the things you like to talk about. Grammatical words are more difficult, and more important, but this is so widely understood that language-learning material already treats them as an entirely separate class of things to learn.
> Also, while it's easy to calculate word frequencies for stuff like newspaper articles, there aren't any good statistics (last I checked) around just normal everyday conversation. Because that stuff isn't getting recorded and transcribed.
(1) You seem to want COCA, which includes a bunch of transcribed telephone calls.
(2) Word frequencies are still the wrong concept. If you want to understand a particular document, you need to understand almost all of the words that appear in that document. (You'll be able to learn some of them from their use in the document.) If you decide to learn a list of "frequent" words, you're unlikely to be able to understand more than a couple of isolated sentences in any given document.
I didn't learn English by reading vocabulary lists or dictionaries. Pretty much all was learned by context.