words in context

Last night I started reading “36 Children,” Herbert Kohl’s account of his first year as a public-school teacher in Harlem. Like Jonathan Kozol and Sylvia Ashton Warner, Kohl is constantly cited in my textbooks for his revelations on public education. (It’s surprising to me that classes don’t assign these trade books, since they are both more insightful and more engaging than our texts. But I digress.)

Something that jumped out at me immediately was Kohl’s account of how his sixth-graders were fascinated by his method of defining the word psyche by contextualizing it within Greek myth. Capitalizing on their interest, Kohl used the root psyche as a hook to introduce psychic and psychology, and eventually went on to replace the prescribed vocabulary curriculum with a study of the evolution of language. He writes:

Before we talked about language and myth the children, if they thought about it at all, felt that most words were either arbitrary labels pinned on things and concepts the way names seem to be pinned onto babies, or indicators as connections amongst these labels. These “labels” probably represented the way the adult world capriciously decided to name things. I doubt whether the children ever thought of adults as having received language from other adults even more remote in time.

Although he was referring to black children in the early 1960s, this observation strikes me as profoundly applicable to English language learners today. Especially for young children who have not yet learned to recognize parts of speech, English must seem like an arbitrary string of unfamiliar sounds; the direction to “write a complete sentence” as incomprehensible as asking someone who has no carpentry experience to build the frame for a house. A young student’s response is invariably a disjointed string of letters resembling words in groupings resembling a sentence. But missing are the foundation, the necessary supports, the correct type of nails…

This analogy makes me wonder if sentence construction could be taught within an ordered framework such as a plant, with subject as root, verb as stem, adjectives as flowers.

More relevant, since I don’t intend to teach elementary school, would be to introduce new vocabulary in context. I already planned to do this to some extent, selecting words for each unit from resource texts and key concepts. But in addition, we could inspect words’ applications, their etymology, their connotations. And there is truly no better subject than social studies in which to analyze the power of words on the collective unconscious! (socialism, anyone?)

Incidentally (and curiously), the WordPress spellcheck software does not recognize the word contextualize (which Merriam-Webster traces to 1934) and suggests that I replace it with conceptualize (which is not what I meant). Yesterday I learned that this type of search-and-replace spellchecking is called the Cupertino effect, which makes me happy because I love being able to assign names to specific annoyances, such as palimpsest. If you know of other terms that describe similarly insignificant irritations, please share! (For example, is there a word that adequately sums up “misuse of the I-before-E rule”? There should be.)

new words

Today’s words were all familiar, but that doesn’t mean I could have described them for you, so I looked them up.

efflorescence, n.
“Contact with other cultures often triggers a cultural flowering. Anthropologists call this phenomenon efflorescence.”
process of unfolding or developing; highest point

polemics, n.
“History is the polemics of the victor.” –William F. Buckley, Jr.

art or practice of argumentation or controversy

manumission, n.
“Manumission gradually flagged … because most of the white Southerners who, like Jefferson, kept their slaves, grew rich.”

emancipation

nadir, n.
The years between 1890 and 1920 were the nadir of American race relations.
the lowest point

paean, n.
(I can’t remember where I encountered this word and I can’t find it used in any meaningful context.)
song of joyful praise or exultation

–from James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me

My new favorite online resource is Wordnik, which not only provides definitions and examples, but also locates where the word appears in Twitter feeds, plus lots of other interesting analytics.

literacy, ho!

(That’s as in land, ho! or westward, ho!, inspired by Detroit Ho!, which is the current project of some people I know. Rhyme rhyme rhyme. Also, I feel like the word readily should be somehow applicable to reading, as in I spent the afternoon readily surrounded by books.)

This post does not have very much to do with education. It begins with a discussion of McSweeney’s Quarterly. I may have mentioned a few weeks ago that I finally bought a copy of McSweeney’s (#34), which is something I used to fantasize about doing around the same time I became a young grown-up and started to do cool things with my life. Now that I have a vintage apartment and a garden and an internship at a nonprofit, I figure I have finally met those conditions.

McSweeney’s #34 initiates with 20 pages of letters, which I am still in the process of reading, so I can’t remark much on the body of its content yet. I am savoring the letters, however, which bodes well for the 200 pages of short stories that follow. Unlike typical letters to the editor, these correspondences generally takes the form of brief, creative expository essays about their writers’ environments. For example, Julio Villanueva Chang writes to tell about the glowing white sky in his hometown of Lima, Peru, as well as the impressions it has left on writers and thinkers over the years. It is a new format that I greatly enjoy and would love to try someday.

McSweeney’s aside, I am in magazine heaven. My aunt and uncle subscribe to a slew of magazines, including Time, Bon Appetit, Condé Nast Traveler, something about wine that is published on thick, shiny paper, and my personal favorite, The Week.

They also receive weekly mailings from the Church of Scientology, which are addressed to the house’s previous resident. My aunt and uncle have lived in this house for 10 years and have made repeated attempts to be removed from L. Ron Hubbard’s mailing list, to no avail. Last night I got to open one of these packages. It arrived in a clear plastic sleeve stuffed with a slick, full color pocket folder and two full-size posters, each presenting the same information. One displayed the covers of L. Ron Hubbard’s entire scientological works organized by topic. The other grouped the same works by position within the prescribed course of study.

According to my uncle, most of the mailings are similar to the one I opened. When I asked him if the scientologists ever send anything cool, like a bumper sticker, or a sample book, or even a letter that’s funny, he just said “no, they don’t.” Essentially, the church is spending an incredible amount of money marketing to people who have no interest in their message, and they never even send anything worth repurposing or keeping. How disappointing.

I haven’t posted new words in a while, so here are a few. I can’t remember where I acquired them, so instead I’ve found examples on the great and profound World Wide Web:

matutinal, adj.
“Get up early and wash your face in the matutinal May Day dew.”
related to or occurring in the morning

–from Ray Murphy, The Boston Globe

costive, adj.
“Winton’s only fault is a certain costive and unaccommodating virtue.”
slow in action, not generous, stingy (literally: constipated)

–from Rudyard Kipling, A Diversity of Creatures

[I especially love the applicability of this word to the bureaucratic functions we encounter regularly!]

lionize, v.
(Here I’ll depart from the typical format to bring you Lionizing, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Read it. It is comical.)
to look on or treat a person as a celebrity

Finally, here is the quote of the week, as spoken by Danny at 826LA while trying to explain the qualities of Choose Your Own Adventure books to a group of eighth-graders:

There has to be action, right? It’s “choose your own adventure,” not “choose your own boring.”

new words

Tyrian, (from Tyrian purple, n.)
“A splendid dark cartoon of a black eye was stamped in a ring around my eye socket, in the richest inks of Tyrian, chartreuse, and plum.”
a crimson or purple dye made by the ancient Greeks and Romans (from Tyre, a Phoenician city)

stagily, adv.
“Francis,” she said in the same bored tone and without looking up. “You haven’t been to see us since last Easter.”
… “Oh, I’ve been fine,” he said stagily.
in a manner relating to the stage, from stagy

–from Donna Tartt, The Secret History

intrepid, adj.
“The young girl and the intrepid Jesuit, both quaking with unchristian passion. Using the Bible as a ruse to be with each other.”
characterized by resolute fearlessness

–from Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

new words

dissemble, v.
“Everyone knew why the doctor had come. He was not good at dissembling and he was very well understood.”
to hide under a false appearance, conceal facts or feelings under some pretense

–from John Steinbeck, The Pearl

axiom, n.
crossword clue: “self-evident truth”
a maxim widely accepted on its intrinsic merit; literally “something worthy” (from Greek)

new words

reticent, adj.
“Your covering letter was admirably reticent, but you did hint that you had almost no free time at present.”
inclined to be silent, uncommunicative; restrained

– from Ian McEwan, Atonement

words words words

Last week one of my assignments required a list of web sites that would be useful to English language learners. While browsing for possibilities, I stumbled onto Wordle (via Langwitches Blog, a fantastic resource for classroom tools and links). It generates word clouds from any text or website or RSS feed. Here’s an example from the first draft of this post:

I can’t get enough of this site. It is equal parts fun and informative, and it appeals to me on all the most important levels: namely literariness and visual aesthetic. I ended up going way overboard describing all of the potential uses of Wordle for ELLs, but I could also see it used in so many other settings. For example:

• even difficult texts become more interesting when you start paying attention to how words are used — and how often
• teachers could Wordle lecture notes to help students identify important concepts or terms
• advanced writers could use Wordle to detect overused words and build vocabulary

I could go on and on! Instead, I’ll post a Wordle from Chapter 3 of Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”:

Now go play!

new words

mien, n.
“Her mien was that of a grinning, toothy jaw.”
air or bearing especially as expressive of attitude or personality.

jejune, adj.
“There was a boyish crackling of excitement in his order. I didn’t like such jejune glee.”
devoid of significance or interest.

–from Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife

new words

abjure, v.
“Christians refused the well-intentioned attempts of Roman civil servants to persuade them to sacrifice or abjure their god.”
to renounce, repudiate or retract, especially with formal solemnity.

caliph, n.
“The Arab governor of Syria, Mu-Awiyah, set himself up as caliph after a successful rebellion.”
successor of Muhammad as temporal and spiritual head of Islam

entrepôt, n.
“Their camps turned into new, cosmopolitan cities such as Kufa or Basra, the great entrepôt of the trade with India.”
intermediary center of trade and transshipment

–from J.M. Roberts, The New History of the World

new words

philippic, n.
“Demosthenes, the last great agitator of Athenian democracy, made himself a place in history (still recalled by the word ‘philippic’) by warning them of the dangers they faced…”
discourse or declamation full of bitter condemnation / tirade

cant, n.
“The grandeur that was Rome sometimes looks more like tinsel and the virtues its publicists proclaimed can sound as much like political cant as do similar slogans of today.”
expression of trite sentiments, especially insincere use of pious words.

–from J.M. Roberts, The New History of the World