The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [80]
The excess vocabulary of sixty-thousand-plus words is explained by sexual selection: the evolutionary function of language is not only to means of efficient communication but to be a signal of fitness and general intelligence. The best single health index, outside of obvious disease symptoms, is body symmetry, but the correlation between body symmetry and intelligence is only about 20 percent. Vocabulary size, and effectively and creatively vocabulary is used, is much more clearly correlated to intelligence, which is why it is still used both in professional psychological testing and more generally by all of us automatically gauge the cleverness of another person. Vocabulary accurately used handy quantitative mea sure with a potential to reach into the psyche order to ascertain a person’s mental powers. Our sensitivity to vocabulary grasp goes hand in hand with a general sensitivity to the ignorant unintelligent misuse of language, which explains why audiences enjoy u lar comic characters such as Mrs. Malaprop, or those unlettered police constables in Shakespeare who make such an entertaining mess trying to use legal terminology that is beyond their grasp. Just as evolutionary implications of good-sized biceps or a youthful complexion ensure that body-building centers and the cosmetic industry will not soon be going out of business, so the fitness-signaling functions of language use mean that books and audio programs for “vocabulary building” are bound to have a permanent market.
Vocabulary is but one aspect of language that gives us a view into human mind: grammar, syntax, word choice, appropriateness, coherence, relevance, speed of response, wit, rhythm, ability to toy with words, originality all play a part. Taken together, these skills and qualities the capacity to speak well publicly, but it is also critical in the most intimate context of courtship—a theme trenchantly explored by Edmund Rostand in Cyrano de Bergerac. Qualities such as vocabulary size, accurate syntax, and linguistic creativity are, despite the fame of Rostand’s play, not often remarked as appealing to profound mating preferences. In fact, excellence in speech is treated almost as an embarrassment by many professional linguists who, perhaps out of a sense of political/linguistic egalitarianism (or a fear of being perceived as grammar-enforcing schoolmasters), have tended to dismiss high linguistic skill and “correctness” as social class marker. But the human interest in sophisticated and original language use is much deeper than any social convention.
Miller remarks that it would be surprising to find a personal advertisement that read, “Single female seeking man who knows fifty thousand useless synonyms.” However, he reports that couples in long-term relationships do tend to have approximately the same size vocabulary that this pairing-equality among couples is indicated more strongly than are other traits. Vocabulary size and skill in language use are therefore further aspects of assortative mating, whereby individuals choose best available mates who will stoop to their level—“the best I can who’ll settle for me.” Thus a linguistically sophisticated lass may shudder to hear a chap say, “My criteria for a decent car is that it gets good mileage,” and tell him that, alas, she is very busy next weekend. Note this is emphatically not a failure of communication: she understands perfectly well what he means by the sentence. However, what signaled—as opposed to intentionally communicated—is that not caught up with Greek plural and singular forms that have into En glish, and that he is therefore perhaps not her kind of can be consoled, whether he knows it or not, that there are any number of young women out there who, having no idea themselves of difference between “criteria” and “criterion,” will be impressed by sound opinions on the subject of gasoline mileage.