I use a lot of big words in my stories. For example, just recently I used extravagent, ostentatious and conspicuous in Jim and the Colourful Coat. And I threw in the shorter but equally uncommon gourd, gradient and plateau when telling Counting to a Hundred. I know it’s not conventional, but I’ve never been able to shrink my vocabulary for children, not when I was telling regularly in Primary Schools, and not now that I’m recording stories for the Palace of Stories.
Partly this is because, as an intuitive storyteller, I need to lay my hands on words fast, and my job is made easier by having a big vocabulary (and by the English language having so many words to choose from!). But it also comes from a hunch that I’m helping children stretch their own vocabulary this way. Children pick up the meaning of a word from the context it’s in. And even if they don’t pick it up straight away, they’ll get closer to understanding it every time they relisten to the story. My son Luke asks me the meaning of any word in one of my stories that he doesn’t understand, and I imagine children listening to my stories are doing the same with their parents or older siblings.
And the flow of the story is not interrupted by such words. The other words carry the story along. Once a friend brought his Brazilian girlfriend along to one of my adult storytelling performances, at a time when she had a very shaky grasp of English. At the end, she came to me with a beaming face, “I understood everything!”
If we are engaged in the story, we are actively involved in creating its momentum. A few new words here and there are not going to stop our enthusiastic meaning-making. Rather, I can think of few better ways to learn new words.
