Well, first of all, the combination of tickling someone squirmy and a laptop keyboard doesn’t always work out for the best. So if my typing gets a bit…lackadaisical, it may be because I’m missing one of my shift keys and too lazy to reach over and use the other.
The interest in big words diminished but didn’t completely cease. I found a website for SAT prep and started to have a word of the week that we would make an effort to use. Abhor was easy. And it was frequently countered with adore.
“I abhor pickles!”
“I adore pickles!”
That site had thousands of words though so I switched to the top 100 SAT words. Now whether these are the most frequently asked words on the test or most common in actual usage, I don’t know. But one hundred seemed a much more manageable number. In many ways, having a word of the week seems artificial and forced, especially when compared to the joy they found in exploring words like perambulate and defenestrate. (We had also figured out by saying words like perambulate, defenestrate, and urinate that the suffix -ate probably meant it was a ‘do’ word.)
While I much prefer the natural acquisition of language, and knowledge in general, having words we are trying to work with helps me more than them. Our vocabularies are rapidly shrinking. Read some Austin or Eliot and do a unique word count. Those chicks had tons of words they used and their vocabs rocked. Seriously, we just don’t use as many words on a regular basis as previous generations. We may be aware of them, be able to define them and use them in a sentence; but outside of a crossword puzzle, we don’t use them. Language is acquired through repetition. If you frequently sit around discussing antidisestablishmentarianism, your children will know the word and what it means. But most of us don’t. Well, we don’t anyway. No matter how many syllables a word has, children can learn it if they hear it often. But we truly don’t use that many words any more even if we know them. So having a list helps to remind me to use a variety of words.
I get a word of the day email from wordsmith . org. I frequently end up deleting it because it is just one of the way too many emails cluttering my inbox. The other day I received sisyphean, which is from Sisyphus. With the Greek myth obsession we’ve had around here since Percy Jackson, we have discussed how some words came from Greek myths like echo and narcissist. Seeing sisyphean, however, made me think to look up how many other words come directly from Greek mythology. I found websites on words from classical mythology, combining their interest in Greek myths and interesting words. (Greek Mythology, Calliope, Muse of Eloquence) So we’re going to start looking at the basis for words like atlas, atrophy, cereal, cerebral, chaos, chronology, echo, furious, halcyon, harp, helium, herculean, hydrant…. this should be fun.
