Erudition

I saw a bumper sticker last week that was in Latin. Such things tend to catch my eye; I’ve got two t-shirts with Latin text on them. On translates into English as, “I have a catapult. Give me all your money or I shall hurl an immense rock at your head.” The other one is a bit sillier, and translates to, “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

In any case, the bumper sticker I saw reads, “Si hoc legere potes eruditissimus es sed parum distas!” This translates to, “If you can read this, you are well-educated and too close!

And, speaking of well-educated (or stretching in that direction, anyway), I have a vocabulary of 35,000 words. This puts me at the top of the “most people” range, and somewhere between the 85th and 90th percentile. They don’t have a lot of data yet, though – the average SAT verbal score for people who’ve taken the test so far is 700. They’d like more people to take their test, particularly ages 15 or younger. My age doesn’t have an average vocabulary reported, though. They only report that for ages 18-32. The data shows an increasing vocabulary size with increasing age, although the data isn’t monotonic. I’m wondering if the increase is regular enough beyond 32 to be worth extrapolating to see how I compare.

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