English is wordy tongue

Question: Is it true English has more words than other languages?

Answer: Quite probably it has more than most world languages, for reasons of history, says AskOxford.com.

Germanic in origin, English after the Norman conquest in 1066 was influenced by Norman French and Latin — language of scholarship and the church — adding large numbers of words.

But word-tallying is problematic. Is "dog" one word or two, the noun and the verb? Are "dogs" (plural) and "dogs" (inflected verb) two more? Is "dog-tired" a word? Is "hot-dog" two words? Do you also count in French words used in cooking, Latin words used in law, German words in academic writings, Japanese words used in the martial arts? Do you count Scots dialect? Youth slang? Computing jargon?

Very rough estimates go to 250,000 distinct words, excluding inflections, words not in current dictionaries, regional and technical terms. Insect names alone number a million plus, with millions more awaiting appellations.

Anyhow, size-prize is meaningless, says University of Oregon linguist Tom Payne, since every language has the mechanism to create new words as needed, such as e-mail (electronic plus mail), e-love, e-solicitation, e-rudeness, e-whatever. "The coinings can go on endlessly, with the real vocabulary not in any static dictionary but in the minds and mouths of the language's speakers."

Question: In a time of need, would you sooner help a stranger or a friend? Easy question, right?

Answer: Easy doesn't apply in the world of people on people! True, you'll sooner help friends ... unless their success threatens your fragile self-esteem, say Elliot Aronson et al. in "Social Psychology."

With a stranger, you're usually not involved enough to be competitive. The two threat-relevant factors are closeness to the person (why sibling rivalry occurs, especially if the two are close in age and one seems more popular or intelligent) and the personal relevance of the help task. When father and son both go into the same field, for instance, they often wind up with a more strained and distant relationship.

If you help a friend do better, you can bask in reflected glory — unless the friend now outperforms you in an ego-critical area. This is called "self-evaluation maintenance theory," or in everyday terms, unless we're saints, No. 1 almost always gets top consideration.

Question: This prosaic-seeming product in your medicine cabinet once helped unloose a genie, catch a criminal and send a person flying 360 feet through the air at 30 mph. Not a bad resume. Got a guess?