8 December 2008 - so many words

Why do languages have so many words? A vehicle is only an object that goes, and if we don’t think of a boor as a vehicle then it ought to be only because a boor tends to stick around. If we were willing to combine our ideas a little more freely, we’d be able to get by with only a hundred words, and fewer wars would be fought over cultural misunderstandings. And besides that, by now we probably would have invented time travel.