Big Word Day takes place on April 21 every year.
As students in the Photography, Video, Television, Audio and Drone programs at Florida Panhandle Technical College will tell you, words matter.
For at least the first one hundred days of their 180 days of regular scheduled class time for these programs of study, these FPTC students are given a list of ten to twenty words each morning, including expressions and terms, which they must then define, explain and use in a paragraph, prior to starting their daily exercises.
These students enter these several programs as graduate high schoolers or young adults, with modest vocabularies and sometimes less-than-stellar communication skills, and leave the program capable of effective communication.
What does vocabulary have to do with Photography? All you have to do is scroll through your social media feed and read the entries of young photographers- any young professionals, for that matter- to see poor grammar, painful spelling skills and totally ineffective communication.
New business people, or prospective employees, for that matter, will not do well with less than great ability to communicate, so let’s find out more about ‘Big Word Day’.
Big Word Day is all about words, specifically coming up with new large words to keep the English language alive and well. Every language on the planet has a lexicon made up of words. Through speech, people have created and polished words over time. We tend to use short words when communicating, so we can convey more meaning with fewer words. Big Word Day is exactly what the world needs.
We use words in our day-to-day life, many of which can be found in a dictionary. An Englishman named John of Garland coined the term ‘dictionary’ in 1220 while writing a book called “Dictionarius” to aid Latin diction. From that time onwards, several attempts at writing a dictionary were made.
It wasn’t until Samuel Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language” that a more reliable English dictionary was created (1755). “Johnson’s Dictionary,” first published in 1775, is highly regarded by lexicographers today. In addition to creating the methodical tone of reference books, Johnson produced a widely emulated style of biography and literary critique.
His dictionary was the first to cover both written and spoken English. It was also the first attempt to impose a spelling and grammar standard on an unruly English language that lacked an equivalent of an academy to defend its use as proper or improper. “Johnson’s dictionary” was the English-language standard for over 150 years, until 1884, when the Oxford University Press began developing and publishing the “Oxford English Dictionary” in short fascicles. It took over 50 years to complete this massive project, and the “O.E.D.” was finally published in twelve volumes in 1928.
In 1807, Webster began compiling an American Dictionary of the English Language, which he completed during his year abroad in Paris, France, and at the University of Cambridge in 1825.
His book contained seventy thousand terms, twelve thousand of which had never appeared in a dictionary. In 1840, the second edition was published in two volumes. G & C Merriam Co. bought Webster’s dictionary after his death in 1843, and Encyclopedia Britannica bought Merriam-Webster in 1964.
