Smarter

Okay, I admit it. I am a logophile. I love words. I use them all the time. Maybe you do, too. Without them, I couldn’t tell you how I felt about them.

Enough of that. One of Steve Martin’s early jokes was him standing in front of people and saying, “Some people have a way with words and other people…..(long pause)….oh, not have way.” Every Saturday I listen to an NPR radio show, A Way With Words. The hosts answer the phone with “Hello. You have A Way With Words.” I love that!

I subscribe to several “word of the day” emails, and I am always writing down new words in the Field Notes pocket notebooks I carry around with me. One of the largest and nicest gifts my wife has given me is a Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. It is huge and weighs about 8 pounds. I use it to look up words because when I open it to a page, there are other words I may discover. That doesn’t happen with Dictionary.com.

Recently I was at Barnes and Noble and saw in their discounted book table a volume titled “1,200 Words You Should Know to Sound Smarter” by Robert W. Bly. It was only $3, so it now lives at home with me. It is basically an abridged dictionary with words, definitions, and quotes with the word in it. I read a page each day. Some of the words are ones I have known for years, but occasionally I run into a new one. For instance, I am now in the I section, and the page contains the following words: iconoclast, ideologue, ignominious, imbroglio (I knew all of those), immure (a new one!), immutable, and impalpable (knew those, too). Since you’re reading this online, I’ll not take up the time with the definition of immure.

This is not purely an academic love of language. I am an avid Scrabble and Words With Friends player. I have several ongoing games online with a couple of good friends. We all play for blood. I’ve lost a few pints, but I occasionally win, and the thrill of victory is….well…..victorious.

Bly claims that these words will make you sound smarter. I do not want to sound smarter. I want to be smarter. And those are two very different things.

Like many people today, I listen to a variety of podcasts. I’ve found that they generally fall into two categories. The first is where one person, usually considered by himself or herself to be an expert in some area, talks about their area of interest. This kind of podcast is usually done by preachers, politicians, political pundits, and sometimes comedians. As I listen to most of those, I do not find the people to be that smart. They usually are just saying the same thing repeatedly. There is no conversation. No discussion with those of differing views. Basically, no new information.

By the way, you do not need to point out the irony to me that a blog post is essentially the same thing. I’m trying to figure out how to do better.

Then there are the ones where there is a host and a guest, where a conversation takes place. And it is on these where I hear people who not only sound smarter but are smarter. One is Carey Nieuwhof’s Leadership Podcast. I have been listening for several years and there is one phrase that I hear in every podcast, usually several times. It comes not from Nieuwhof, but from his guests. That phrase is “That’s a good question.” Nieuwhof is smart not because he has a lot of good information (which he does) but because he has learned the art of asking good questions. Not questions with predetermined answers, like the ones in the Hillsdale College “polls” that pop up on social media. They are designed to get the answer that the College is looking for. They are like most salespeople, who ask you questions to guide you to their predetermined goal. Nieuwhof, on the other hand, asks questions that can lead to new understandings, not only by us but by him. Smart.

And I love to listen to The Hidden Brain podcast with host Shankar Vedantam. There is a phrase I hear several times on each of his podcasts. This time it comes from him, the host. It is “Tell me more. Help me to understand.” He is looking for something new.

(I highly recommend both podcasts.)

And maybe that’s the key to actually being smarter, rather than just sounding smarter. You continue to learn new things, to grow, to expand.

Years ago, an angry church member told me she didn’t come to church to learn anything new. (We had prayed the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish that Sunday. We had a large group of Spanish-speaking people with us that day and we wanted to do what we could to make them feel welcome.) So many people have decided that they already know everything they want to know. So they stop growing.

And this world is so big, and so wonderful, and filled with so many glorious things, that doesn’t sound very smart to me.