Words

Active and Passive Vocabulary

   I’ve been reading a miscellany of books and articles, now that I am mostly free of duties, more  than in recent years. That’s part of the reason why recently I’ve become more conscious than before of my relationship to language. The other cause of that phenomenon is that during times I’m awake during the night and first thing in the morning, German, my first and only language until we came to America at my age twelve, keeps popping into my head, mostly in the form of the opening verses of maybe half a dozen German children’s songs. I take this quasi-return to childhood to be one of the more benign age phenomena, since I’ve had little occasion to use German in some years.

   I have always realized that there was little if any difference between my active and passive vocabulary. This, it has been said, is not unusual when a second language has been acquired. It contrasts with an alleged norm that, as I understand it has the vocabulary one is able to use when expressing oneself be nowhere near as large as the one that is understood.

   Now, for some reason I have recently become self-conscious about the words of which my reading was composed. I came across quite a few words that I could not recall ever having used when writing. Mind you, I am not talking of an esoteric vocabulary or bits of technical language, not to mention slang or “indecent” words, but of perfectly ordinary English ones that I have just never employed in written sentences I have constructed.

    I had always thought that the difference between an active and a passive vocabulary is essentially a difference of knowledge: one can correctly deploy one’s active vocabulary in every appropriate context. One can understand—make out the meaning of—one’s passive vocabulary, on the other hand, when coming across it in someone else’s writing or speech, though without being sure as to how to use it.

   If my recent spate of self-consciousness has revealed anything at all it is that there is another sense of the pair of active and passive that is more idiosyncratic and somewhat mysterious.