Being articulate makes you dangerous and is a definite advantage.

it depends what you care about. you know how crayola sells a simple box of 8 crayons? and also boxes with 64 and 128 and possibly even more.

if you don’t care about nuances and variations, nobody’s forcing you to upgrade.

You’ve gotten some great answers. I’m just going to go with - so you don’t sound like a fucking idiot

I go by the “very” example.

That one word can be utilise to mean more/much. But read the difference and the thoughts that follow it.

Very angry - furious Very hungry - Starving/ravenous Very bad - atrocious Very quiet - silent Very tired - exhausted

The non “very” words convey a deeper volume and depth in comparison.

I had a similar query as a teenager growing up in India. My mum offered a good analogy to get her point across- why have the color pink when we have red? Or why have light blue when we’ve navy? Words are like colors- they have a distinct meaning- they are like an ingredient in a recipe with distinct characteristic. Now of course the recipe will taste bad if you use too much or too little of an ingredient. So usually when you come across a bad writing it’s the writer and not words you should hate. Most well written books use simple words. Orwells advice on what makes a writing good is followed by many contemporary authors. Clarity is hallmark of good writing so i don’t know what books you’re referring to.

It’s like a tool set. I can do basic jobs with basic tools, but if it’s something special, it requires the right tool for that job. There’s dozens of ways to describe something, but there’s always the best answer. I’d rather be pushed to learn what a new word means than be talked down too and read simplistic writings over and over

Why many words use. When less do much as good.

Not only does it help you express yourself, it essentially helps you think. If you lack language to describe something, be it a feeling, and object or anything else, its very hard to grasp the concept of it, let alone explain it to someone else. Sure, you could use common words, but you’ll be limited to what they represent in your thought process. For example, I might feel sadness—but maybe I actually feel grief, or melancholy, or longing, or yearning, or heartache (and so on). Most words aren’t exact synonyms; they represent shades of meaning you might want to convey or understand. Language even affects how you think about distinctions between things. Are light blue and blue shades or different colours, for example? Depends on what you call them in your native language.

Lacking language makes defining your identity harder, too. Sometimes people deliberately try to deny someone else the words to describe what is happening to them and/or what they are, and it’s a powerful tool that fucks you up.

A. A larger vocabulary means you can understand people and books that use different words.

B. Words are not exact synonyms , there are shades of meaning lost if you just use the simple words. It’s like living on white bread and government cheese - you can do it but you lose all the delight of different flavours and textures.

C. Every community has its own technical terms and jargon, if you don’t learn the words your neighbours and workmates use, you get left behind.

Its not a question of learning new words just to be sesquipedalian - using long words for the sake of it - it’s a question of both precision and joy in language.

Just shut up and do your homework kid.

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

even the simple easy words must be learned. teachers say you speak english with 100 words. would you be okay with just that? you could try. and you can technically paint with just five colors and represent everything. but nobody is that good. more paints means more accuracy, and more words means more accuracy. with 100 words you can build a village, but with real vocabulary helping you, more complex jobs become first possible, then easy. no spaceships were ever built without careful conversation and precise language. “the tolerance of the o-ring is 0.001 m” uses three vocabulary words and without it the challenger mission was lost. you just cant say that sentence meaningfully without some solid language. o-rings are not something anyone “eyeballs”, and .001 m tolerance is a meaningful concept that people must learn since nobody can feel it, but “tolerance” means “acceptable error that wont break stuff” here, and even that goes over peoples heads.

nobody who went to the moon knew that they would do that as a kid. they did their homework and prepared for anything. they could have built submarines just as easily. or fought a war.

but calling a post a tweet is not vocabulary. reach for powerful vocabulary, not the most basic popular garbage. knowing ten words for snow is not worth much.

learn some latin vocabulary, if you want to better understand english. learn a computer language vocabulary and try programming. or learn a whole language! you might think being able to say things in another language isnt useful; leave that aside, and it still trains your mind to work on a whole new level.

need makes it seem like you have a problem now, and you dont. but you have opportunities. among many things, native english speakers are prized english teachers (as long as they can learn some foreign vocabulary). its actually one of the few forms of education that comes with real employment opportunities.

I’m with Borges with simple and easy. The message I think should be clear for the reader, in quantity and quality. However as - if I remember correctly - Wittgenstein said it, the limit of my language is the limit of my world. Some time we need specific words suited for what we want to express.

Words parse human experience into cognitively understandable bits that we can then think about, express to others, and relate to in written form. So, knowing more words gives you better insight into life, other people and yourself.

Did you really need five different subreddits to give you an answer to this question? If English is your second language, I can see how this would be of interest to you.