One thing I've bought a lot of is books. In the US, growing up, we're told reading is good and having a large vocabulary is one way to "sound smart". Heeded uncritically, the advise "read a lot" can lead you to become more foolish and more vain than if you couldn't read at all.

Often talking to people does a lot more than reading books. There's this idea in the Western world that books are these repositories of facts or "information". Obviously, books typically are filled with words. But just how to understand the meanings of these words isn't always readily available. While a car's manual will be pretty "literal" and straightforward, one could easily read a novel or watch a movie with little to no idea about who produced that work and for what reasons. This is very important to know for interpreting many things.

The Search Engine View on Language

Looking at a resource like Google books and/or Google N-grams, you gain access to lots of information. You can see the earliest uses of some words, when terms became more/less popular, and compare frequencies of competing terms, among other things.

Doing this, you can gain access to a lot of facts, such as the word such-and-such was used more often than some other word during some period of time. Doing an activity like this, do you learn anything about what sorts of meanings people are expressing?

In linguistics, there is this term "arbitrariness of the sign" for the idea that the spoken/written form of a word doesn't reflect anything about what it expresses in of itself—it is arbitrary. For many, many words, there is a sense in which this is true. ¹

Indeed, we can take old word forms and give them new meanings. For instance, in 2020 in the USA, when we say "orange man", we all know who this refers to. Likewise if I started to call people "sleepy" (or "creepy") it would be understood that I'm probably not talking about cute kittens taking naps or spooky skeletons on halloween. This old, familiar terms have taken on new connotations in the present time. ²

Nowadays, we are encouraged to throw around words recklessly. Signs and slogans plaster every street corner. Really, these signs convey the meaning something along the lines of "I think such-and-such are the good guys, and if you support such-and-such you're a bad guy". Add in specifics as you like.

Meanings First

Many sayings of wisdom point out the value of practicing silence and/or seeking silence/solitude.

Words are not "neutral" things that are just "out there". A resource like a bilingual dictionary is not sufficient for learning a second language, though it may be a useful tool. In order to understand a second language, you need to have lots and lots of exposure to speakers of that language.

While intaking a lot of words and learning how to use language well is not a bad thing in of itself, it is also not necessarily a good thing. Just as potatoes might be the best thing to eat for one person and lemon juice over chicken might be good for another, the diet of what words we consume can likewise affect our "verbal wellbeing".