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Consider also the differences within languages. The average vocabulary of a 14-year-old in 1950 was 25,000 words. By 2000, it had dropped to 10,000 words. I once spent a decade in an isolated industrial area with a 50% dropout rate, low academic achievement with few advancing to college and fewer returning. Ten thousand words would have been a stretch.

Thereafter I moved into a University town and the differences were striking. They were not cultural but lingual. The same words and phrases but completely different meanings. I would catch myself staring at random conversationalists. I was hearing for the first time in years the language of my childhood. With the language came renewed precision and perception.