Step VI: Vocabulary—I

To read rapidly you must instantly recognize thousands of words. You have probably discovered already in doing some of the practice drills that failure to know a word puts a power brake on your speed. The only way to overcome this handicap is to add constantly to the reservoir of words at your command.

In a short book like this it is impossible to go into specific exercises designed to increase your store of words. You will find excellent manuals on vocabulary building in the paper­backs. Buy one and study it at the same time you are working on rapid reading.

I also suggest that you get a special notebook in which you write down unfamiliar words. Don't stop to look up words while you are reading. When you have finished is the time for a session with the dictionary. You will retain the word better if you copy the definition and put the word immediately in a sentence. It's a good idea to review new words regularly till you are sure you have mastered them.

Now let's consider this matter of vocabulary, and it would be a good idea for you to do a little self-searching on the state of your present familiarity with words. As you learned in the Introduction, every person has three types of vocabulary:

1. Active.   These are the words you customarily use in speaking. Your active vocabulary probably runs from 5,000 to 10,000 words.
   
   
2. Reserve.   These are the words you know but rarely if ever use in ordinary speech. You use them in writing a letter, when you have more time to consider or when you are searching for a synonym.  You know these words well enough so that you would not hesitate over them in rapid reading.
   
   
3. Passive.   This is the odds and ends residue of words that you recognize vaguely but are not sure of the meanings. You never use them in either speech or writing.   You just know that you have seen them before, and they'll stop you dead in rapid reading.

To increase the size of your vocabulary you should con­stantly upgrade words until they are part of your active vocabu­lary, ready for use when an occasion rises. If you work at this, you will be pleasantly surprised at the words you begin to use. Even quite unfamiliar words may find their way into your con­versation. As an example, the recent craze for dinosaurs brought dozens of forbidding-looking words into the vocabu­laries of youngsters fascinated by the great prehistoric reptiles. You may never have known the Latin names — and there are no common ones — of such beasts as tyrannosaurus rex, stegosaurus, triceratops, brontosaurus, pterodactyl, archeop-teryx. But if your children started producing dinosaurs from the make-it-yourself kits you had to learn the words to keep on speaking terms.

The sudden opening of the space age pushed a good many new and difficult words out of the science laboratories and into everyday conversation. To pick another example, the appear­ance of plastics as a household commonplace in clothing mate­rials and kitchenware also contributed many new words to the language.

If you get the dictionary and notebook habit, it will put both color and accuracy into your every-day speech. When you know the precise meanings of all the words in your passive vocabulary now, you will find that you speak with more assur­ance and without the sort of painful, awkward, round-about sentence structure which a meagre vocabulary makes necessary for the person who does not know the words which would express his ideas with exactitude.   Don't be timid with words.

How the Newspaper Helps

Your newspaper is a ready means of building vocabulary, and in a later chapter I shall explain in detail how you can use it to fullest advantage. Since you presumably read a news­paper every day, make it pay off for you right now by adding new words to your store. Newspapers are designed for quick reading, but this doesn't mean that all the words are simple and familiar. In its daily job the newspaper covers many kinds of events. It describes them with the words best suited to tell the story briefly and clearly.

From a single issue of a newspaper I collected a list of 30 words. They are not difficult, but see if you can recognize and define each with confidence. If you can't, look it up. These are all accurate representations of ideas which in most cases would require several words to express differently.

agenda             derogatory         expunge            lenient               protocol
avaricious         dinghy                facet                 megaton           rescind
coalition            disillusion           fantasy              moratorium       scourge
cognizant          dispossess          ideological        motivate           seismic
contemporary   embargo            incongruous      opulence           venerable
decade             evasion              indicted            posthumously    zealous

If you will note down a few unfamiliar words each day from your newspaper your vocabulary will begin to grow and flower.

Prefixes and Suffixes

One quick aid to vocabulary building is knowing the pre­fixes and suffixes from which many words are built. Mastering their meanings will help to increase your reading speed too. It opens the door to what I call intelligent anticipation, a tool all rapid readers learn to use. A grasp of the familiar prefixes will get you into a word quickly; a knowledge of the suffixes will get you out of it, since you anticipate what the rest of the word must be from the shape of the ending.

The modern English language contains many words taken over from other countries. Often good English words are made up of parts borrowed from other languages. The prefixes and suffixes come chiefly from Greek and Latin and they usually appear in English with the original meaning intact. This gives an immediate clue to what the word you are about to read will mean. It may suggest a certain kind of action: out, off, away from, down, up, around. Or it will warn you that the word is going to have a meaning characteristic of, or relating to, or belonging to. Suffixes often express the same kinds of relations or actions.

Let's take two words apart to see how this works:

The prefix amphi- is Greek, and one of its meanings is "of two or both kinds." Bios is also a Greek word and means "life." Put them together in "amphibious" and you have an animal that has two lives — in the water and on land. Or, as "amphibian," the word means an airplane that will take off and land on either the ground or the water.

Now a suffix, -able. This is such straight English that it seems unnecessary to remember its Latin origin as -abilis. Any­way, the meaning is obvious when you add it to such a stem as "love." "Lovable" means simply worthy to be loved. All the "ables" have the meaning of able to, capable of, worthy of, having qualities of, leaning toward, etc.

Here are 20 common prefixes and 20 suffixes to start you out:

Prefixes, ambi-, an-, anti-, apo-, bi-, com-, di-, hemi-, hyper-, hypo-, in-, meta-, mono-, para-, peri-, poly-, pre-, pro-, syn-, trans-.

Suffixes, -able, -acy, -age, -ance, -arium,- ary, -en, -esque, -gamy, -ic, -ine, -ist, -ity, -logy, -ly, -ment, -oid, -ous, -tion, -tude.

Copy these down and learn their definitions. You will find them all and others in any of the several fine desk dictionaries available — and everyone studying Modern Reading must have such a dictionary. Prefixes and suffixes are listed in their proper alphabetical order as though they were complete words — that  is,   "-tion"  follows  "tiny."

Children are taught simple sums in addition, subtraction and multiplication as "arithmetic facts" to remember. Much of the drudgery of doing problems is taken away when they have mastered these "facts." Prefixes and suffixes are "reading facts." Knowing their meanings gives you a head start in quick perception (and that word carries both a prefix and a suffix, you will notice).

A bigger vocabulary plus these reading facts will speed your perception rate. This is simply the time required for your mind to recognize words from the images the eyes flash to it. Speeding up your perception rate leads to faster reading, since it cuts down the time required to absorb a word. That is why a wide vocabulary is so necessary to the rapid reader.

Don't stop just with adding words you have never seen before. Make sure you clear up doubts about words only half understood now. Then use them, say them in conversation. Don't be timid. Speak up! This growing articulateness will make you more sure as you read that you have got the full sense of what the author was saying. As your word knowledge builds confidence, your comprehension builds with it.

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