Vocabulary

I'm constantly amazed at my 7-year-old's vocabulary. The other day he was asking me about the difference between the words "smear" and "smudge." More recently it was the differences between "akin" and "identical" that interested him. This is the same kid that two years ago volunteered the definition of "gaunt" as "it means your belly is small so that you can see your bones," and who explains, when asked what the difference is between a jaguar and a cheetah, that a cheetah has spots while a jaguar has rosettes. Maybe this only reflects on my lack of prowess with words, but I think that his vocabulary has surpassed mine, or soon will.