Vocab

Those of you who glance now and then at my other blog (Daily Doggerel--also on Blogspot) know that the lines I post there often deal with words. In fact, the last two series I've done there (I'm not finished with the second) have dealt with words that appeared on vocabulary lists I used with my 8th graders at Harmon School in Aurora and, recently, with the high school juniors I taught at Western Reserve Academy.

I wasn't always obsessed with words--with learning new ones. My strategy in my boyhood reading was, simply, to figure out the word from context, and if I couldn't, well, I'd skip it. Couldn't be that important, you know?

And so I continued at Hiram High School. Occasionally, a teacher would give us vocab quizzes, and I remember when Mr. Brunelle (English II and III) gave us tacit (silent, unspoken). And I discovered to my alarm that I could not remember that damn word. And so I put it on my own vocab lists later!

I had a wonderful professor at Hiram College, Dr. Abe C. Ravitz, who sort of changed my tune. In class he often used words I didn't know--but wanted to know. Words like lycanthropy and transcendental and picaresque.

I would write them in my notebook, then look them up when I was back in my dorm room. (No smart phones then with the OED on them!)

When I began my life in grad school (the fall of 1968), I expanded my process: In my notebook I would write down words I didn't know in my reading assignments--as well as the words I heard in class. I would look them up, learn them.

I remember one of them: spatchcock (noun: a fowl split and grilled usually immediately after being killed and dressed; it can also be a verb). I used it in one of the papers I wrote in one of my education courses, and the prof wrote nearby something like this: Don't use strange words in your writing. I ignored that advice.

And so in articles I later published I used the words exoteric (readily comprehensible) and the like; my editors sometimes deleted them/replaced them.

Still later, getting obsessed with writer Jack London, I learned how he, eager to learn new words, would write them on scraps of paper, carry them around in his pockets, memorizing them--even affixing them to the wall of his room above his desk. Dedication, eh?

As my teaching career advanced, I gradually began forming vocabulary lists from words my students would encounter in the reading we would be doing. (The premise: See it in a story and feel like a genius!) And so, for example, to my high school juniors I offered eldritch (= weird), a word I'd found in The Scarlet Letter: Pearl, in utter scorn of her mother's attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became silent ... (near the end of Chap 7).

I thought that was fun--not sure if the students did.

Anyway, I'm still learning new words--often from my reading, often from words that arrive each day on my devices, words from my various online word-of-the-day providers.

There comes a time in life--if you live long enough (which I have)--when you begin forgetting more than you're learning. I think I'm close to that stage. Sometimes, I know, it's not true forgetting; it's a matter of recall (and thus the appeal of my iPhone!). I used to be Jeopardy-quick with my recall. Now? It's pretty much just plain jeopardy, a word that means ... that means ... I'll get back to you.