While sorting books, I came across Debra Bell‘s The Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling.
The following section, taken from page 23, fascinates me:
Care to hazard a guess as to the sources of each of these vocabulary lists?
LIST 1
- aggression
- divergent
- prestigious
- bizarre
- cogent
- propagate
- ambiguous
- exonerated
LIST 2
- inimitable
- epistolary
- assailed
- invidious
- assiduous
- appendages
- sagacity
- pecuniary
SOURCES:
List 1: SAT I (revised) Practice Test
List 2: Fourth-grade McGuffey Reader, in use during the late 1800s (after compulsory education was mandated). An 1897 fifth-grade reader we purchased at a library sale includes the same literary selections I studied in my undergraduate American literature courses. (Bell 23)
I showed the lists to my 12-year-old daughter. She read them both and chuckled.
“I told you not to read the sources,” I said.
“I didn’t,” she assured me. “I just thought it was interesting how much harder the words were on List 2 than on List 1.”
I pointed at the sources. “Check it out.”
She read them. “Wow! So a fourth grader back in the 1800s knew harder words than someone studying for the SAT today who is maybe 16 or 17 years old?”
“I guess teachers just expected more from their students back then.”
As I said that, I blushed. I’m not 100 percent certain what all those words mean, and I’m a bit older than a 16-year-old studying for the SAT!
Makes me want to expand my personal lexicon. How about you? If you want to launch a leisurely plan for increasing vocabulary, join me as I experiment with some of these simple ways to learn new words:
- Wordsmith.Org. A.Word.A.Day http://wordsmith.org/awad/index.html
- Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/mwwod.pl
- Oxford English Dictionary http://www.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd
- New York Times, Word of the Day http://www.nytimes.com/learning/students/wordofday/
- Vocabulary Vitamins http://www.vocabvitamins.com/
- Word Think http://www.wordthink.com/
- Play Free Rice.
- Read books, read challenging magazines (think The Economist rather than People), and then read more books.
- Keep a record of words learned, whether a journal, note cards, loose leaf pages in a 3-ring binder, OneNote, or a Word document. I plan to include with the word and definition a sample sentence using the word in context (I’ll copy the example from the dictionary or the sentence from the text where I found it).
- Review suffixes, prefixes and roots (found a game). Lots of sources for this.
- Review personal word bank often.
- Assiduously incorporate new words into blog posts, conversations, e-mails, and journal entries.
Work cited:
Bell, Debra. Ultimate Guide to Homeschooling. Nashville, TN: Tommy Nelson, 1997.
Photo: “word up! c-o-f-f-e-e…” by Debaird, available for download from Flickr through a Creative Commons license.
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The more challenging crossword puzzles are good, too. Not the fill-in-the-words kind, but the ones that make you think. My favorite, as you know, is the Wall Street Journal weekend puzzle on Friday. Then you become a cruceverbalist!
Good idea on the crosswords, Mom.
For ease of learning, here’s a link to the definition of “cruceverbalist”:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/cruciverbalist
And here’s a link to the Wall Street Journal weekend crossword puzzle online:
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/puzzle-current.pdf
How did I learn anything new before the Internet? I guess it was my beloved library!
I knew there was something amiss with current educational standards, but I thought that maybe my memories of primary school were a bit off… what with it being 3 decades since. However, it really had not dawned on me that the discrepancy would be THAT much! Oh boy!
(I’m bookmarking this post, until I can get around to all your links)
Thank you, Ann
I don’t remember learning such difficult vocabulary in high school. I should have tried a little harder in college to teach myself as I encountered new words.
Hope the links are helpful.
I’m not surprised Ann. I would certainly like to expand my vocabulary. These are great suggestions. I also find that if I’m reading a book written in the 19th century, it helps to have a dictionary handy!
When I facilitated an American Lit class last year, that’s exactly what I had my students do–have a dictionary on hand to look up the new (old) words! The Scarlet Letter really is an SAT-word-bonanza! (And frankly, I think it is a much-maligned book. I liked it, and two of my ten students cited it as their favorite.)
It’s interesting to read books/writings from that era, and you get the feeling that folks tended to use more flowery language. Now it makes sense – they were probably better educated! I wonder, though, if there were a lot fewer kids being educated to begin with, so they had higher expectations. Also, the culture of ‘children” wasn’t in full swing yet – children were still treated like little adults (destined to help out on the farm, family business, etc).
In any case, I certainly admire you’re delving into vocabulary expansion! I’m sure it will help your writing, and soon will be talking circles around me!
Interesting about the history of children–so you’re suggesting that perhaps adults were speaking to children without all that baby-talk? That would raise the vocabulary level that children had to comprehend.
I’m slow to retain vocabulary and even slower to incorporate it into my work. Plus, I don’t want to sound high-falutin’.
Hi Ann,
It’s amazing when I look at this list for three reasons:
1) I couldn’t tell you what all those words mean, either.
2) Parents think we push our kids too hard academically; as I digest what was expected of children in the 1800s, I think we push kids to have too much on their plates–not enough in their brains
3) I’ve been working on a University grant to recruit families for an early childhood education study to improve education in AZ. We are at the bottom of the academic poll nationwide. Would we need this program if children were progressing academically as they should?
Thanks for your post, Ann. Looks like I need to check out your reading list to improve my vocabulary!
Blessings,
Janis
I love that one line in particular:
“I think we push kids to have too much on their plates–not enough in their brains.”
As the author of a book about piling too much on our kids, I may quote you on that!
I don’t know how you feel about homeschoolers, but I really believe that Charlotte Mason’s approach to education gave my kids a really great foundation to loving learning. Charlotte Mason advises we eliminate what she called “twaddle” from our kids’ lives (lame reading material with no plot, no rich characters, and simplistic vocabulary; by exposing the children to inspiring stories, complex characters facing inspiring conflicts–all in a noble theme–we lift them up to higher places. We expect more, and the kids rise to the occasion.
I love new words and think it’s a good goal to be intentional about them. I need to formulate a plan. Thanks for the good resources!
I decided to use some outdated business cards as my vocabulary cards. Found a cute box at Goodwill. I signed up for one of the word-of-the-day things above and knew two of the words, so I don’t necessarily learn a new word every day. I have to wait for one I don’t know. I want to really absorb and integrate the words.
Nice list.
Recruiting “Play Free Rice” addicts? Hard to put the brakes on that game!
So true! Hm…now that you mention it, I think I’ll go play it right now!
Oh wow, that makes me think about our education system. As far as increasing my vocabulary, I’m in! I love to learn new words. Thanks for sharing your list.
Yes…what can be done? Can we aim higher (as an educational system)?
We can certainly aim higher individually.
Yes, our education system is a sad state of affairs. When did we start expecting so little? What great resources though…bookmarked! My daughter is an aspiring writer (um, she’s 7 and writes all.the.time!) …and building her vocabularly is so important…I need to follow suit (with building vocabularly..not being a writer! Haha!)
Maybe if enough of us start working on our vocabulary, gradually raising the reading level of our blogs, let’s say, could we start a trend? We don’t need to sound all Nathaniel Hawthorne or Herman Melville…but we can surely fight the textspeak and slang that has stretched beyond the boundaries of youth and into mainstream culture…maybe?
Maybe I’m too much of a dreamer. An unrealistic optimist.
I feel fortunate to have had some good English instructors, who believed in basic stuff. Also, in college, I had great professors in Creative Writing and Journalism and philosophy, where I encountered some ideas of logical positivism and began to pay closer attention to words. And what they originally meant. We use some words so casually and carelessly that we wear out their meanings, even if we ever understood them. I’m working presently on some Christmas meditations, (JOY TO YOU, TOO) trying to come to the story with an open mindset and trying to feel and think as those who were involved in these events. I’m examining the cast of characters. I’m forming a glossary of terms, and trying to recapture some of the freshness and power of words (ideas) like glory, joy, Savior, Messiah, Christ, etc. If you’ve examined those concepts in detail, I’d like very much to consider your ideas. What do the words really mean? Where is the joy, the glory, etc., in our celebration of such an eternal event? Thanks for sharing your thoughts. dkimrey@gmail.com or Scripturestudent.wordpress.com
“good English instructors who believed in basic stuff.”
This is inspiring to me as I create a writing course for high school students. I’ll be facilitating it this fall, and vocabulary acquisition is part of it. Basic stuff.
I hope to get them paying “closer attention to words.”
Your project sounds great. May you dig deep and find hidden treasure!
Interesting post. My thoughts: 1) Mandatory education means some wind up teaching to the lowest common denominator. 2) Some words just fall out of fashion and therefore aren’t recognized today. 3) Tweets and texts require short words!
My Dad always made me learn new words. Now I’m thankful.