Me Talk Pretty One Day

[beetiger]

Houghton-Mifflin, the publisher of the American Heritage Dictionary, has just issued a list of one hundred words that all high school graduates should know. They've picked them so that they touch on a variety of topics that people should know a little about (mitosis for biology, filibuster for civics, antebellum for history, etc.)

The actual list :abjure, abrogate, abstemious, acumen, antebellum, auspicious, belie, bellicose, chicanery, chromosome, churlish, circumlocution, deciduous, deleterious, diffident, enervate, enfranchise, epiphany, equinox, Euro, evanescent, expurgate, facetious, fatuous, feckless, fiduciary, filibuster, gamete, gauche, gerrymander, hegemony, hemoglobin, homogeneous, hubris, hypotenuse, impeach, incognito, incontrovertible, infrastructure, interpolate, irony, jejeune, kinetic, kowtow, laissez faire, lexicon, loquacious, lugubrious, metamorphosis, mitosis, moiety, nanotechnology, nihilism, nomenclature, nonsectarian, notarize, obsequious, oligarchy, omnipotent, orthography, oxidize, parabola, paradigm, parameter, pecuniary, photosynthesis, plagiarize, plasma, polymer, precipitous, quasar, quotidian, recapitualte, reciprocal, reparation, respiration, sanguine, soliloquy, subjugate, supercilious, tautology, taxonomy, tectonic, tempestuous, thermodynamics, totalitarian, unctuous, usurp, vacuous, vehement, vortex, winnow, wrought, xenophobe, yeoman, ziggurat.

It's not a bad list, I think. They've included a lot of my favorites, including metamorphosis, loquacious, and sanguine, but have skipped some words I am very fond of, including indefatigable, chimera, flabbergasted, and plethora.

When I was a young child, I was a voracious reader. I was pretty good at figuring things out from context, so I didn't always learn to pronounce words that I knew just from reading. I pronounced hyperbole wrong for years. I won't try to claim that I never use words incorrectly, even words I mostly know, in moments of confusion, but I try to act embarrassed when someone catches me on it. I tend to hang out with writers and folks who think being intelligent is rather charming, and a lot of them use "SAT words" regularly. Not that long ago, reive got flamed by someone who thought her journal was pretentious, just because she has a vocabulary richer than the average ten-year old. It's certainly possible to be intentionally obscure, or extermely obnoxious, by using words you don't expect your listener to understand. (See the Vance-inspired RPG "Dying Earth" for a notable example of this.) But sometimes, the right word just happens to be obscure, such as when we used the word "espalier" in World Tree, because that was in fact what we were talking about. Sometimes words are just fun, like the word "wittol" which Bard recently presented to me. There is, moreover, still some beauty in our language, some joy in pulling ourselves out of the mundane and into the unusual, isn't there?

What are some of your favorite words?

Comments

[sushimare.livejournal.com]

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

:)

[queenofstripes.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Peter Bowler's Superior Person's Book of Words?

[supersocks.livejournal.com]

circumlocution, a flaw of mine. :)
Conducive, NOT conductive, as people often misuse it.

Boy, I miss the SAT, and all the great words I learned for it. :)

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

Favorite high-school level words:

Natural sciences: catalyst
Math and computers: algorithm
Humanities: protagonist
Religion: messianic

[werellama.livejournal.com]

When I was in high school, I had an American Authors teacher who once a week would give us a list of words she felt we should know and we had to memorize them. About 2/3 of the words on the Houghton-Mifflin list I knew because of Ms. Mead. *shouts out a thank you to Ms. Mead*!

[shaterri.livejournal.com]

Has there ever been a word quite as onomatopoeic as susurrant? I rather like the sound of obsequious from the list, myself. Loquacious and sanguine are both fantastic wods too, and I imagine there are a dozen more that I won't think of until I see them in print again -- although tempestuous might be my favorite on their list. Auburn, a wonderful word for a wonderful color (although in some ways roan is even better). And so on, and so forth.

On the flip side of this, though, even fairly weighty words can start to become overbearing if you see them too much. There was a running joke among my friends for a while that Mr. Noriega's three first names were 'Panamanian Strongman Manuel'; his name was never mentioned without all of them being there. MUCKing has especially sensitized me to this, I think; at this point I don't care if I never see another midriff as long as I live. Words pick up a lot of context, both good and bad, and individual as much as collective. Everyone is speaking a language unto themselves, whether they know it or not.

[tygermoonfoxx.livejournal.com]

Hey, another vocabulary whore ;) I've always loved big, descriptive words. It's unfortunate that when I talk or write, most people have absolutely no idea what the words mean or what I'm saying. My personal favorites: sacreligious, plethora, remediate, transcendent, opalescent, and ergonomic.

favorite words

[cloverr.livejournal.com]

My favorite word is ephemera; it's a good word for librarians and collectors. Zafig is also a nice word; makes me feel lively and joyful instead of fat. Words I embrace and reclaim from negative connotations include slut and freak.