Give Us 15 Minutes a Day

Your boss has about three times as large a vocabulary as you have. That’s one good reason why he’s your boss. The authors of 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary show how the leaders of the world in every field are masters of words. And they prove that one of the quickest and easiest ways to get whatever you want most in life is through increasing your vocabulary. Dr. Funk and Mr. Lewis do not treat words as literary instruments. They show you that they are the necessary tools of your thought. You can’t even think without them. Therefore, the more words you have at your command, the more effectively you can think, the better you can influence others.

This powerful volume gives you simple and workable exercises in vocabulary building that are fun to do. It makes the learning of new words an exciting game. Within the space of 30 days you will add more new and usable words to your vocabulary than the average adult will acquire in 25 years. This volume is compact, authoritative, practical. It shows you how you can improve your vocabulary by studying the bill posters, the car cards in the subways or busses; or while you are listening to the radio, seeing the movies, or reading your sports column.

This book is designed to help everyone: the college graduate, the educated or uneducated, young or old. As you read it you are also gaining ground in pronunciation, word histories, and parts of speech, without realizing it. You will find scores of tests, a whole section that will make a parlor game for your friends. Give only 15 to 30 minutes a day to this new book for a period of one month, and you will discover that it will work an almost miraculous change in your career.

Seldom, if ever, has a more competent team of experts joined resources and talents in the production of a book on words. Wilfred Funk is noted as a lexicographer and a doctor of letters. For more than thirty years he was associated with the publication of encyclopedias and standard dictionaries through his connection with Funk & Wagnalls Company of which he was president for sixteen years. That association and an intense and lifelong interest in words and the tremendous part they play in everyday life, combine to form the background which he brings to this collaboration.

A scholar who refuses to belong to the dry-as-dust school, Dr. Funk believes that a book of this type, to be worthwhile, must not only be authoritative and helpful but extremely interesting and entertaining. This, by the way, is his eighth book, the earlier works ranging from light verse to a fascinating and amusing volume called So You Think It’s New. Critics have said his style is “as fresh as the day after tomorrow,” that he has “the champagne touch.”

His collaborator, Norman Lewis, has been a writer on words for years. He regularly conducts a word department in the national monthly magazine, Your Life, and his word sketches have appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, This Week, Better English, and many other publications. In addition, Mr. Lewis has had an intimate and practical experience in teaching English and currently conducts regular word study courses throughout a wide territory in New York State. He is the author of Vocabulary and Spelling, a series of textbooks for schools. Their collaboration proves that when two such experts got together on a book like this, the reader profits immensely.

Your boss has a bigger vocabulary than you have. That’s one good reason why he’s your boss. This discovery has been made in the word laboratories of the world. Not by theoretical English professors, but by practical, hard-headed scholars who have been searching for the secrets of success. After a host of experiments and years of testing they have found out:

That if your vocabulary is limited your chances of success are limited.

That one of the easiest and quickest ways to get ahead is by consciously building up your knowledge of words.

That the vocabulary of the average person almost stops growing by the middle twenties.

And that from then on it is necessary to have an intelligent plan if progress is to be made. No haphazard hit-or-miss methods will do.

It has long since been satisfactorily established that a high executive does not have a large vocabulary merely because of the opportunities of his position. That would be putting the cart before the horse. Quite the reverse is true. His skill in words was a tremendous help in getting him his job.

Dr. Johnson O’Connor of the Human Engineering Laboratory of Boston and of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, gave a vocabulary test to 100 young men who were studying to be industrial executives. Five years later those who had passed in the upper ten per cent all, without exception, had executive positions, while not a single young man of the lower twenty-five per cent had become an executive.

You see, there are certain factors in success that can be measured as scientifically as the contents of a test-tube, and it has been discovered that the most common characteristic of outstanding success is “an extensive knowledge of the exact meaning of English words.”

The extent of your vocabulary indicates the degree of your intelligence. Your brain power will increase as you learn to know more words. Here’s the proof.

Two classes in a high school were selected for an experiment. Their ages and their environment were the same. Each class represented an identical cross-section of the community. One, the control class, took the normal courses. The other class was given special vocabulary training. At the end of the period the marks of the latter class surpassed those of the control group, not only in English, but in every subject, including mathematics and the sciences.

Similarly it has been found by Professor Lewis M. Terman, of Stanford University, that a vocabulary test is as accurate a measure of intelligence as any three units of the standard and accepted Stanford-Binet I. Q. tests.

The study of words is not merely something that has to do with literature. Words are your tools of thought. You can’t even think at all without them. Try it. If you are planning to go down town this afternoon you will find that you are saying to yourself: “I think I will go down town this afternoon.” You can’t make such a simple decision as this without using words. Without words you could make no decisions and form no judgments whatsoever.

A pianist may have the most beautiful tunes in his head, but if he had only five keys on his piano he would never get more than a fraction of these tunes out. Your words are your keys for your thoughts. And the more words you have at your command the deeper, clearer and more accurate will be your thinking.

A command of English will not only improve the processes of your mind. It will give you assurance; build your self-confidence; lend color to your personality; increase your popularity. Your words are your personality. Your vocabulary is you. Your words are all that we, your friends, have to know and judge you by. You have no other medium for telling us your thoughts — for convincing us, persuading us, giving us orders.

Words are explosive. Phrases are packed with TNT. A simple word can destroy a friendship, land a large order. The proper phrases in the mouths of clerks have quadrupled the sales of a department store. The wrong words used by a campaign orator have lost an election. For instance, on one occasion the four unfortunate words, “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” used in a Republican campaign speech threw the Catholic vote and the presidential victory to Grover Cleveland.

Wars are won by words. Soldiers fight for a phrase. “Make the world safe for Democracy.” “All out for England.” “V for Victory.” The “Remember the Maine” of Spanish war days has now been changed to “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

Words have changed the direction of history. Words can also change the direction of your life. They have often raised a man from mediocrity to success. If you consciously increase your vocabulary you will unconsciously raise yourself to a more important station in life, and the new and higher position you have won will, in turn, give you a better opportunity for further enriching your vocabulary. It is a beautiful and successful cycle.

It is because of this intimate connection between words and life itself that we have organized this small volume in a new way. We have not given you mere lists of unrelated words to learn. We have grouped the words around various departments of your life.

This book is planned to enlist your active cooperation. The authors wish you to read it with a pencil in your hand, for you will often be asked to make certain notations, to write answers to particular questions. The more you use your pencil, the more deeply you will become involved, and the deeper your involvement the more this book will help you. We shall occasionally ask you to use your voice as well as your pencil — to say things out loud.

You see, we really want you to keep up a running conversation with us. It’s fun. And it’s so easy. And we’ve made it like a game. We have filled these pages with a collection of devices that we hope will be stimulating. Here are things to challenge you and your friends. Try these tests on your acquaintances. They will enjoy them and it may encourage them to wider explorations in this exciting field of speech. There are entertaining verbal calisthenics here, colorful facts about language, and many excursions among the words that keep our speech the rich, flexible, lively means of communication that it is.

Come to this book every day. Put the volume by your bedside, if you like. A short time spent on these pages before you turn the lights out each night is better than an irregular hour now and then. If you can find the time to learn only two or three words a day — we will still promise you that at the end of thirty days you will have found a new interest.

Give us fifteen minutes a day, and we will guarantee, at the end of a month, when you have turned over the last page of this book, that your words and your reading and your conversation and your life will all have a new and deeper meaning for you. For words can make you great!