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Posted by Dave on 16/11/2001, 4:36:24
Last weekend I watched a great movie called "Pay It Forward" starring Kevin Spacey, Helen Hunt, and Haley Joel Osment. I'm sure many of you have probably seen it also, and you'll remember that Kevin Spacey played the role of a fairly intellectual elementary school teacher. At the beginning of the school year he hands out dictionaries to each student, and every time he uses a word that the kids aren't familiar with, he writes it on the board and assigns them to look it up it their dictionaries. Immediately, the whole idea clicked with me... and I've begun a new "habit"!
Often as I'm reading, I come across a word that I do not know the ACTUAL definition of. I may have a shady idea, but the meaning is not CLEAR. So I have started a little notebook of definitions, and my goal is to learn ONE NEW WORD A DAY. In the front margin I put the date, then the word, then the definition. I really feel that this is going to be a lasting habit, because it is so rewarding and I already feel dreadfully committed to it. I feel that this practise is going to help me in my writing ability, and general comprehension. And IT IS SO EASY! Just one word a day!
So far this week alone I have learned the precise meaning of the following words (mostly encountered in my reading of The Razor's Edge): dowager; perfidy; turgid; florid; alacrity; lacuna. And the way I have it set up, I can see the word while covering the definition, which will make it real easy to inflict weekly and monthly quizzes on myself.
Well, I just thought that this little literary venture of mine might also appeal to someone out there. Anyone out there do anything similar?
Happy reading. Happy learning.
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Posted by Chris on 16/11/2001, 21:41:55, in reply to "A Word A Day."
I do something similar, but not nearly so organized.
When encountering an unfamiliar word I usually write it down on whatever bookmark I'm using. The bookmark may range from a scrap of paper, a napkin, a free bookmark from amazon.com, or whatever I happened to have nearby when I began the book. As a result, I have a drawer in my desk full of napkins, scraps, and other eclectic items with all sorts of unusual words on them. I enjoy digging through them to see what I can remember; it's sort of a pop quiz for myself.
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Posted by Lale on 17/11/2001, 19:30:23
Chris, I do that too, the exact same thing, I write unfamiliar words or concepts or other things to look up on my bookmark. But sometimes, I don't get around to looking them up. I transfer the bookmark from book to book to computer table to things-to-learn-scrapbook to ... you get the idea.
Dave, what you are doing is great. Did you know that there are 15,000 distinct words in Shakespeare's collected plays and sonnets? I would highly recommend Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct". It is one of the most brilliant non-fictions I have ever read:
"... we can estimate that an average six-year-old commands about 13,000 words (notwithstanding those dull, dull Dick and Jane reading primers, which were based on ridiculously lowball estimates). A bit of arithmetic shows that preliterate children, who are limited to ambient speech, must be lexical vacuum cleaners, inhaling a new word every two waking hours, day in, day out."
"...Nagy and Anderson estimated that an average American high school graduate knows 45,000 words - three times as many as shakespeare managed to use! Actually, this is an underestimate, because proper names, numbers, foreign words, acronyms, and many common undecomposable compounds were excluded. ... If they had been included, the average high school graduate would probably be credited with something like 60,000 words (a tetrabard?), and superior students, because they read more, would probably merit a figure twice as high, an octobard."
And one last quote from The Language Instinct, this one is funny:
'... a candidate for the longest word to date in English might be FLOCCINAUCINIHILIPILIFICATION, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "the categorizing of something as worthless or trivial."'
By the way, I collect dictionaries and grammar books, perhaps a floccinaucinihilipilificative hobby?
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 21/11/2001, 2:33:31, in reply to "Re: A Word A Day."
Not to belittle the brilliance and talent of Pinker, his book is constructed on a wrong premise.
It is a good and informative book though, but in addition I recommend to read Jean
Aitchinson "Words in the Mind" and Terrence W. Deacon "The Symbolic Species" - the
latter as a correction of the fundamental flaw in Pinker's underlying hypothesis (which is
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Posted by Lale on 21/11/2001, 13:43:20, in reply to "Re: A Word A Day."
I will most definitely get these books, but are they as fun to read as Pinker's?
Can you say a few words on the "wrong premise"?
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 21/11/2001, 16:34:54, in reply to "Re: A Word A Day."
Aitchison is certainly great fun to read - despite the fact that it is a real text book for students (but easily accessible.) Deacon is not so witty, but extremely lucid and an absolute must read.
The wrong premise, of course, is Chomsky's hypothesis of an underlying meta language, or in Pinker's words, a "language instinct." Unfortunately the hypothesis is beginning to solidify in academic circles and to enter the textbooks as gospel.
As a translator and language teacher (in China) I have noticed how completely impractical Chomsky's proposition is, if you try to make it work in the classroom. Besides one needs only to consider the different handling of tenses in different languages, to find Chomsky's idea dubious - to say the least: Russian, just to express the past, uses 7(!) different tenses, Hebraic uses no tenses at all - only present and perfect.
I have great respect for both - Chomsky and Pinker - but I know a bit of Chomsky's academic back-ground. He was not a linguist to begin with, but came to languages from philosophy and an early infatuation with Immanuel Kant's table of categories. Saunders Peirce's interpretation of Kant's categories as a linguistic sub-structure instead of a purely cognitive phenomenon gave Chomsky the confirmation he was looking for, and eventually sent Chomsky on his way to his own "The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory."
So Chomsky's (and Pinker's) are not entirely based on empirical observation, but interpret observation on the grounds of preconceived notions of sometimes dubious provenance - even if their pedigree can be followed back to Aristotle.
Anyway, Deacon has a much more convincing and empirically sound explanation for our linguistic abilities, which establishes a solid link to the evolution of our species without the need of taking recourse to a sudden mutation of special abilities - like Pinker and Chomsky's hypothesis requires. And his comparison of language as an operational interface like the interface that makes it possible for you to operate your computer, is truly an eye-opener.
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