Interesting questions.

Great writers know what to do with words. First-rate writers don't need "great words" -- exotic, rare words that occur about once in every 100 million words uttered by speakers of the language, and have very, very specific meanings. Great writers generally tell compelling stories with run-of-the-mill words: words that compose the heart of the corpus of English (don't know about word usage in other languages).

Run-of-the mill writers reach for too many words, too many different words, and too many rare words--because their word-skill confuses glitter with real gold.

Of course, we need more than words:. If of words not organized our properly strings are, they don't mean much. Sentences have to be structured well too, then paragraphs, then chapters, and there's the book.

Here's a bit of verse by George Herbert which I like; it demonstrates word skill. It's quite simple English. The English speaking world had gone / would go through periods of disdaining this kind of plain English and would prefer as multi-syllabic as possible. Writers of complex English had word skill too -- it isn't just the simpler language writers that demonstrate it.

BY GEORGE HERBERT 1593–1633

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
...

I think of a word as a tool.

The skill of the user of a word could be divided into
- Knowledge that - the word exists in one's language
- Knowledge how - to use the word skilfully

The analogy with a physical tool works here. A skilled trades person knows (1) what tools are available to do a job and (2) how to use those tools skilfully.

Like with chisels, knowledge how to use a word is a continuous rather than binary datum. One can know broadly what a word means, yet not grasp all the nuances of it. A skilled wordsmith will make full use of those nuances.

There are some words that I know-that they exist, and don't forget that because they are funny-sounding, easy to remember words, but for which I keep forgetting the meaning (the knowledge-how bit).

Examples are crepuscular, crapulous, rebarbative, cupidity.

Like with chisels, knowledge how to use a word is a continuous rather than binary datum. — andrewk

That's a beautiful point. Totally wish I'd thought of it. I think we could do something with that.

Just a little amplification.

The first analogy I thought of was kids learning how to draw. You don't just learn how-to-draw, as one big thing, and you don't just learn how-to-speak-English as one big thing. When you're just starting, you have to learn how to draw a straight line when you need one, how to draw curves of different kinds. Those feel like distinct skills. You can draw for years before you draw a hand you're happy with! It's a specific skill that will go into the meta-skill of drawing. And just like with language, you have to use those skills together, and so on.

So I thought of how we think of learning the meaning of a word, like learning a definition, and then use that word when we need something that means that. But what if we looked at it the other way round? We could just say you learn to say that word when you need it. If that's what it means to know the meaning of a word, you needn't think of it as a bit propositional knowledge at all. Adding a word to your vocabulary is learning how to use it, so it's learning how to do something, not learning that something.

But what about understanding?

But what about understanding? — Srap Tasmaner

The ability to hear or read speech and interpret it accurately -- and vividly -- is huge. It takes time and practice to achieve it. High schools students, or college students, even English majors god forbid like me 50 years ago, may not be skilled in reading vividly -- that is, animating the emotive and symbolic content of written speech. (It took me a long time to develop)

We have distinct, and separate, verbal (word) skills. Among those are...

hearing words and understanding the sound and the meaning
reading words and understanding the shape and the meaning
the facility to generate written language
the facility to generate spoken language
the facility to think verbally
Some of these skills are resident in specific brain locations. Damage that specific part of the brain and
-- might not be able to understand language
-- might not be able to generate language
-- might not be able to think verbally

Even without damage, some of the word skills are fixed to one communication channel. There are words that I can understand (written and verbal) that I never use myself. There are words that I think with that I can't readily transfer into spoken language. There are also styles of composition that I can't generate (like long passages of rhymed iambic pentameter.).

Some people don't understand written, or don't understand spoken language as well as they might like. Fortunately, these skills can be improved, however difficult it might be.

BTW, I have no idea where in my head written speech is generated. I am sitting here, fingers moving, but I am not consciously generating this content. Somewhere upstairs it's getting put together and then dropped into the chute and out it comes.

"I" don't very often consciously sweat over a text. Usually I just open the spigot and out it comes. Were I to write something in French, it would be all sweat, all conscious deliberation every inch of the way.

I had forgotten some of these are separable and others I didn't know.

(a) Do we think these losses are better described as losses of ability or losses of knowledge.
(b) Do we have other reasons for thinking, whatever we think of the descriptions, that what we're talking about here must be knowledge, or must be an ability. (I'm thinking of how it might fit with other parts of a model, other theories, that sort of thing.)

(Btw, yes Herbert is quietly astonishing.)

(a) Do we think these losses are better described as losses of ability or losses of knowledge. — Srap Tasmaner

Probably more as a loss of ability. Injury or stroke may deprive someone of speech. They can't talk to old friends, but they can respond non-verbally, nodding confirmation that they understand (as long as their language-reception circuits are functioning). Interestingly, people who are aphasic (can't speak) can usually swear fluently. Cursing happens to be handled outside of the main speech area. Intelligence (the ability to solve problems, way finding, carry out tasks, etc.) is not usually impaired by aphasia.

I know that the issue has been studied--I don't know the upshot--how do you assess someone's state of knowledge if they can't speak? If received language is disrupted, then it would be even more difficult to distinguish ability from knowledge.

(b) Do we have other reasons for thinking, whatever we think of the descriptions, that what we're talking about here must be knowledge, or must be an ability. (I'm thinking of how it might fit with other parts of a model, other theories, that sort of thing.) — Srap Tasmaner

It's not either/or, it's 'and'. People who have received poor nurturing as children and little formal education generally will not have much verbal knowledge. They may have small vocabularies (relative to other people) and may have very poor ability at formulating expression. They just sound stupid. Here, it's clearly a lack of knowledge and underdeveloped ability.

People who have received good nurturing as children and poor education may demonstrate very skilled ability, and not too much knowledge. They won't sound stupid, just uninformed. Well nurtured and at least adequately educated children have the whole package: ability and knowledge, wrapped up together.

If you were to map out the various human abilities and fields of knowledge just with respect to communication (like, words) you would end up with a complex chart -- before you started bringing in other matters (like personality, memory, intelligence, etc.) Spatial relationships, mathematic ability, linear thinking, blah blah blah -- would require still bigger, even more complicated maps.

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing. — Bitter Crank

This strikes me as great poetic structure, not specifically great use of simple words. Although I suppose the two are intertwined, especially in verse like this.

So I thought of how we think of learning the meaning of a word, like learning a definition, and then use that word when we need something that means that. But what if we looked at it the other way round? We could just say you learn to say that word when you need it. If that's what it means to know the meaning of a word, you needn't think of it as a bit propositional knowledge at all. Adding a word to your vocabulary is learning how to use it, so it's learning how to do something, not learning that something. — Srap Tasmaner

This is totally on point, per my view. Language is a living thing. That's a metaphor, but it's a metaphor about language. It's barely even a metaphor, in that sense.

So what do you think? Is a word a skill you learn? Or is it just another piece of propositional knowledge? — Srap Tasmaner

I've been writing a piece for Academe about 'the familiar' so I've been thinking about this too. It does seem to me that in developing our first language we do indeed find words coming to us when we need them. When we first hear them or read them we may ask what they 'mean', or look them up, but often much of our 'knowledge' here is of the contexts in which we learnt them, and, as andrewk points out, in the continuing contexts where their meanings shift.

If you're interested in the analytic academic side of this, here's a paper that's actually still a draft, but is publicly available, due in a forthcoming book about 'acquaintance' : https://www.academia.edu/33085495/What_Acquaintance_Teaches

They put it technically as 'objectual knowledge by acquaintance is an example of a non-propositional, intentional state'. They spend a lot of time on Mary and her colours, but the ideas bear on your issue, particularly in claiming there can be such 'non-propositional' knowledge. I don't think words and shapes of word-formations are 'intentional' myself but that would take some unravelling to work out. I don't think words/word-formations can be *just* in a tool-box. Often they float freely to us as if they're just part of us, built into how we feel or want to express how we feel or what we think.

I don't think there's anything crazy about that. When you learn a word and particularly when you learn how to use a word you learn a skill. That seems obvious.

Think of learning a musical chord or a lick, say. Certainly it's not controversial that when you learn (how to use) a chord or lick you've learned a skill. Language is the same thing.

So what do you think? Is a word a skill you learn? Or is it just another piece of propositional knowledge? Is it maybe even more natural to take words as tools, and the skills we learn are specifically tool-using skills? How do you think the dual (knowledge-that and knowledge-how) aspects of language fit together?

I don't think a word is a skill I learn, I do think the use of a word, how it fits into my use of it to communicate is a skill. A word is a sound design (I think words retained their affective quality in our inner monologues, which comprises like 99% of language use), which may be sufficient in itself or may require additional sound designs for its use to achieve desired results.

How those sound designs are composed, the skill in word use depends on an individual's proficiency and understanding (imaginative,creative, normative) of combining a word's syntactic categorization with its meaning in communication and thought. The ability to learn language is universal in humans and there are apparently areas of the brain which handle/specialize in syntactics. It may be that the basic syntactic structure of the brain has multi-uses, for language, computation, music and (my guess) perception.

Music makes an even better analogy, because there's the skill needed to perform, but there's also theoretical knowledge (which my son keeps trying to impart to me). As a musician, you're constantly flipping your perspective between those, aren't you?

So what do you think? Is a word a skill you learn? Or is it just another piece of propositional knowledge? Is it maybe even more natural to take words as tools, and the skills we learn are specifically tool-using skills? How do you think the dual (knowledge-that and knowledge-how) aspects of language fit together? — Srap Tasmaner

Words (i.e. utterances of language) are neither a skill nor a tool. Language is an ability we possess that enables us to communicate. Communication is a skill. Some of us are more skilled than others. I'm terrible at communication, for example.

There are many sorts of things, musical instruments, tools, and so on, of which I can know what they are and how they are used without myself possessing the skill to use them. Can the same thing be said of a word? Is there a step left to take between knowing how a word is used and knowing how to use it? Or from knowing how to use a word to being able to use it?

You can know, in a sort of theoretical way, how to swim, how to ride a bike, and so on, without being able to. With language, the theoretical knowledge seems to be completely coincident with the practical ability, and that's odd. (I feel certain I'm repeating here something Ryle said about abilities.)

Words in themselves carry nearly zero content. The important thing is parsing sympathetic and empathetic systems. Words give you the ability to parse perception, see deeper and clearer. Paranoia is caused by strong sympathy that one lacks the empathy to parse. Gullibility is not having the sympathetic prowess to correlate all the words.

Part of the theoretical knowledge is the skill how to use, which is different than the skill how to perform.

The skill how to perform, with respect to natural language, is akin to knowing how to spell or pronounce a word like "epistemology." That's comparable to, say, knowing what notes are in an A major seventh chord, knowing what keys or strings/frets to place your fingers on, etc.

The skill how to use is akin to knowing how to use epistemology in a sentence.

They're both skills.

With music, then, it's knowing how to use, say, a major seventh chord in a chord progression or how to use a particular pentatonic lick in context, or how a ii chord (a minor chord based on the second note of a given scale that you're working in the context of) functions with respect to a V chord, a vi chord, etc.

As an aside, when you're performing as a musician, you want to be at a point where the "how to use" skills are internalized. You don't want to have to think about that very much when performing. It's just like extemporaneous speaking in a natural language. If you have to think too much about just how to fit the words you're using into sentences, whether the word fits the context or not, etc., you're going to have trouble speaking off the cuff. You need to have that internalized.

When you're in a composition mode, though, or when you're writing a book, say, that's a different scenario, and you can take the time to experiment with things, try more obscure things, etc.

Yes, words are like tools, and just as a hammer is not a skill, neither is a word. Skill is about ability. A hammersmith is skilled with a hammer and a wordsmith is skilled with words. Both have the ability to do something well: with hammers and words, respectively.

I'm still not sure. I worry a little that the word "use" makes us think of words as tools.

If you play a song on the piano, you strike the right keys at the right time to produce the right notes. The song is made up of those notes. We don't normally say you "use" the notes to make the song, although a composer explaining a piece might say something like, "Here I'm using an A7 to build tension" or whatever. You obviously use the piano to make the notes, to play the song.

I'm not worried about this as a question of English usage. You play the song by playing the notes. Playing the notes is playing the song. There's no temptation here to think of the notes as tools. The act you perform is not made up of the tools you perform it with. It's made up of smaller acts you perform.

This seems really close to the way we speak (or write or think). But maybe words are simply more like material. The clay is not the tool you make the sculpture with, or the paint the tool you make the picture with. (W. C. Williams once described the poem as "a small machine, made of words.")

My interest here is not literary. I'm not trying to find the best metaphor for language use. I'm looking for clues to theorizing better about language.

But words, and notes for that matter, are like tools in a limited sense. You use notes to compose a piece of music, just as you use words to compose a sentence. Playing the music is like speaking the sentence. The piano is an instrument used to produce music, and our vocal folds are an instrument used to produce vocalisation. And the materials used by artists, whether clay, paint, or other, are also like tools, in that they have a use, and are used to bring about the end product.

There are like three different threads in here, which is totally my fault.

First off, sure, the piano and your vocal folds are tools. I might even be willing to say that language is a kind of technology we use to communicate (among other things). Another way to say that is, "We use words to communicate," where "words" basically means language. That ambiguity is unfortunate.

I wasn't looking for use in that broad sense, but in the sense that the meaning of a word is its use in sentences, the semantic contribution it makes to sentences it appears in. (When you learn how to use a word, you've learned what it means.) I was wondering if instead of there being a generic skill--using the word ____--maybe using the word "red" is a skill, using the word "crepuscular" is a skill, and so on, just as drawing a straight line is a skill, drawing a hand is a skill, etc. (I recall now that somewhere Dummett says the issue here isn't so much individual words, but word types: how to use color-words, number-words, mass nouns, proper names, etc.)

Looking back, I don't think I ever explicitly said I meant there to be an analogy between word/sentence and note/tune. (As the tune is made of certain notes in a certain special arrangement, the sentence is made of certain words in a certain special arrangement.) But that's why I end up unwilling to say that words are tools, even if I might be willing to say that language is a tool, because I was thinking of the use of a word in a sentence rather than the use of "words," i.e. language, to say something.

But now I need to say that these two uses of "use" are the same, or at least really closely related. A word is used in a sentence precisely in the sense that a sentence is what we use to perform what we can vaguely call a "linguistic act," the sense in which we use language to do something. That still doesn't exactly make a word a tool. I'm not even sure I would say a sentence is a tool. Language is more like a shared technology that includes the producing and consuming sides of the transaction.

But I do have one more observation. I lean toward molecularism, which is why I was claiming that we don't learn an entire language in one go, and wanted to look at how we add words. But there may be a sense in which that's false. No one actually uses, or ever learns, more than a proper subset of a given natural language. This need not be an idiolect--I mean only that fewer than all the words in the language are used, but those are used in the standard way. We're surely not going to say that you don't speak English unless you speak all of it. Speaking a proper subset is the norm. There may be a sorites here--how much of the language do you have to speak? Or we could just allow that there's a continuum. (I speak "ein bißchen Deutsch.") If we do that, then from the moment you learn how to use an English word, you're in the same position as the English speaker you learned the word from; the only difference is the cardinality of your subsets.

That allows us to connect language as a shared technology to the use of a word right from the start.

There are some words that I know-that they exist, and don't forget that because they are funny-sounding, easy to remember words, but for which I keep forgetting the meaning (the knowledge-how bit).

Examples are crepuscular, crapulous, rebarbative, cupidity. — andrewk

I can't help thinking there's a joke here about Buddhism and enlightenment. "Andrew doesn't even know the meaning of the word 'cupidity.'" Something like that.

No one actually uses, or ever learns, more than a proper subset of a given natural language. — Srap Tasmaner

Here I think you're going back on your own original impulse about 'use', though, and I admire the original impulse more. We find ourselves saying words, or writing words, or understanding words heard or read. To call this finding-ourselves-doing-something 'use' is not quite right, though sometimes near enough for jazz. Our language and our selves intertwine in expression and understanding.

What after all is 'a given natural language'? It feels to me that there is some residual myth of the given lurking in this. There is no monolithic English, for example, portions of which we gradually acquire. This imagined abstraction is sometimes conjured into life by grammarians and pedagogues, but lived languages are a plurality, being renewed all the time, with enough in common between us that we understand each other and can make ourselves understood.

No one actually uses, or ever learns, more than a proper subset of a given natural language. — Srap Tasmaner

Here I think you're going back on your own original impulse about 'use', though, and I admire the original impulse more. We find ourselves saying words, or writing words, or understanding words heard or read. To call this finding-ourselves-doing-something 'use' is not quite right, though sometimes near enough for jazz. Our language and our selves intertwine in expression and understanding. — mcdoodle

I think the bit you're talking about was concerned with representing our knowledge of a language propositionally. There's a whole lot to recommend that view, but no one here has risen to its defense, so we haven't really talked about it. I'm still in the skill camp, but we've been discussing what kind of skill that is. (And maybe that just comes down to analysing skill-concepts better.)

As for the word "use," it's standard, and I'm fine with it. It is true that a lot of what goes into the use of language is involuntary and unconscious, but we still count as the agents. (Since posting, I have been thinking a lot about what else the word "use" means in this neighborhood, but I'm not ready to go into it yet.)

What after all is 'a given natural language'? It feels to me that there is some residual myth of the given lurking in this. There is no monolithic English, for example, portions of which we gradually acquire. This imagined abstraction is sometimes conjured into life by grammarians and pedagogues, but lived languages are a plurality, being renewed all the time, with enough in common between us that we understand each other and can make ourselves understood.

I used "given" here to mean "arbitrarily selected." Just shop talk.

I don't disagree with the substance of the rest of what you say here, but I am unapologetic about conjuring into life imagined abstractions. It won't bother me to use a fictive English that's just a union of the vocabularies of the members of some English-speaking community, a snapshot at some time of all the words any of them use. On the other hand, I don't need it. I can get the same point just by noting that snapshots of the vocabularies of the community members are not identical. For everyone, there are words they don't know or use that are known and used by other members of their community. In short, the plurality you speak of was exactly my point.

The point of making that point was to legitimize treating beginners as users of the language, despite their lack of competence. At the moment, I'll just add that beginners are treated by competent users of the language as pre-competent, as being on their way to competence. We interact with them as users of our language from the beginning. They're sort of "honorary members" of the speech community.

"Andrew doesn't even know the meaning of the word 'cupidity.'" Something like that. — Srap Tasmaner

It's a really weird phenomenon. I must have looked it up at least ten times over the last forty years, understood the definition, realised its usefulness, and remembered it for a few days, maybe even used it a couple of times. Then it's gone.

Some words just refuse to stick in my head - or their definitions do, rather. The word itself hangs around to taunt me with my inability to remember the definition.

Is it just me?

It's your level of enlightenment, man.