What makes a good vocabulary?

My husband Doug and I just got back from an excellent holiday in Catalonia/Catalunya, in the North of Spain (that's where Barcelona is, geography fans!)

The trip was made easier because I Speak Spanish. (Otherwise known as Castellano, the dominant form, one of five indigenous languages spoken in the country and not the one spoken in Catalonia, but I digress.)

We went for a walk through the beautiful Garrotxa national park, which is full of extinct volcanoes. The best one had a chapel - a whole chapel! - right inside the crater.

And that's when I almost stepped on the snake.

(I don't recommend stepping on snakes - it's a bad idea. What's interesting is that you actually jump sideways before you think 'snake!' The reaction is pre-language.)

And that's when I realised I didn't know the Spanish word for 'snake'.

A horrible scenario played out in my head - me getting bitten, Doug calling the ambulance, and me fighting my way through 'it was an animal that makes the sound 'hiss' and is long like a string and bendy' on a call to the emergency services.

The thing is, I had had a complete conversation about local attitudes to Catalonia becomming an independent nation state and Madrid's objections to the idea earlier that day. When I had that conversation, I would happily have said I spoke good Spanish. But I didn't know the word for snake. Because 'snake' is not a word that comes up frequently in conversation. Over the course of the holiday, I identified further holes in my vocabulary, of which a short sample is:

Wrist

Sheet

Hem

Corn

Hair conditioner

Gastroenteritis (don't ask)

...and yes, I've learned them now. The point is this:

Specialised vocabularies are incomplete. To know a language well, you must know the words that come up infrequently - like snake, and wrist, and corn. These words seem basic, because they communicate basic concepts, but they don't come up in day-to-day conversation as much as you may think, and especially not in the language of business (unless, of course, you are in the business of selling corn). It's been a wake-up call for me, and an incentive to improve. I only wish the incentive hadn't involved a poisonous beast.

For the record, Spanish for snake is 'serpiente'.