You know what?  There’s so much I don’t know on top of what I did know but have forgotten.  Take words.  There are tens of thousands of words in the English language with some estimates including technical and obsolete words taking the total as high as one million.  Looking up an answer to how many words there are in our language different sources range from under 200,000 on upward through 400,000, 500,000, 600,000…..you get the picture.  The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary lists 171,476 words in current use.  The average vocabulary size for native English speakers ranges between 20,000-40,000 words including our passive vocabulary, words we understand, and our active vocabulary, words we actively use. Think about conversations we have in a given day and that’s a lot of words.  Next time you’re bored pick up a dictionary.  The longest word in our language has 45 letters.  It refers to a lung disease.  I’d have to practice it for a while to pronounce it.   Here’s a short word with no vowels, “nth”, as in to the nth degree.  Here’s a word I never heard before, “evapotranspiration”.  It’s the process where water is transferred from land to the atmosphere through evaporation and transpiration, the latter being the process where plants release water vapor into the atmosphere from their leaves.  So many words I don’t know it’s scary.  And by the way, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is not a real word. 

That’s Coffeetalk.  I’m Vic Dubois.