Vocabulary can peak in one's 40s or even 70s. There are different studies. I've found recently that words are coming more quickly to my brain as I write. It has to be le mot juste. I was just thinking about how I was complaining about someone's effort to complete a Lorca play, and I used the word confection, "an elaborately constructed thing, especially a frivolous one." I don't know if I could have come up with that 20 years ago.
I also think about my critique of Venuti. I can use words like querulous, plaintive, and lachrymose to describe his tone. His book has been cited 19,000 times, according to Google Scholar, but he can still present his field as marginalized and stigmatized.
Adjectives are wonderful and spicy. You can have a petulant dogmatism, for example. The prejudice against adjectives is rather silly. Their use doesn't produce wordiness. Wordiness, rather, results from a lack of discipline in constructing well formed sentences and paragraphs.
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