CONTEXT

Listen to the podcast version of this article.

If you're trying to expand your vocabulary, you really need to pay attention to context. Context means the total surroundings of a word - the ideas and discussion that lead up to a word and that follow a word. That framework often contains clues that allow you to figure out what an unknown word means without going near a dictionary. But you have to know what the clues are and how to use them. That's what we'll discuss in this podcast.

(1) Word Clues
         Sometimes the writer deliberately includes a definition near a difficult word and uses word clues to alert you to that fact. Some of the word clues are very subtle, like the various forms of the verb to be: They act as = signs:

·      An aglet is the plastic or metal tip at the end of a shoelace.

·      Lipomas are fatty tumors.

·      Haruspication was the practice of foretelling the future by examining animal entrails.

·      In medieval times, falciform swords were sickle-shaped in order to behead enemies with a single blow.

         Sometimes the word clues, instead of being subtle, club you over the head by using obvious terms such as this means, may be defined as, is called, was referred to as, is known as, that is.

·      Stenoky means the ability of an organism to live only under a very narrow range of environmental conditions.

·      Tenacity is defined as the ability to hold firm to one's beliefs under pressure.

·      The medieval system that bound peasants to their master's land was called serfdom.

·      A generalized feeling of ill-being with symptoms such as heightened anxiety, discontent, or vague physical discomfort is known as dysphoria.

·      Some people are contumelious. That is, they are rudely contemptuous, insulting, and enjoy humiliating their victims.

 

(2) Punctuation Clues
         Sometimes a writer will include a definition near a difficult word and use the following punctuation marks as a signal: commas, dashes, or parentheses. The definition might be inside these marks, or the difficult word might be inside these marks. Either way, it's a very useful clue.

·      Duplicity, deliberate deceptiveness in action or speech, is one of the surest ways to destroy a friendship.

·      Appositives -- words, phrases, or clauses placed next to a noun -- often contain definitions.

·      Small molecules may be combined in complex ways to form larger molecules (macromolecules).

·      Substances through which electrons will not flow easily, insulators, include glass, hard rubber, porcelain, and plastic.

·      Prosopagnosia -- difficulty in recognizing familiar faces -- is associated with damage to the right hemisphere of the brain.

 

(3) Synonyms
         A synonym is a word with a meaning very close to the meaning of another word; it can replace the other word. When the synonym is simpler than the unknown word, it can act as a clue to the meaning. Sometimes the difficult word is accompanied by a cluster of easier words meaning the same thing. Sometimes the synonym shows up in a later sentence as a replacement for the difficult word. Watch for equivalent terms, for the same thing said in a different way.

·      She is one of the most perceptive, insightful, and perspicacious persons that I have ever known.

·      Beware of politicians who make nebulous and vague promises.

·      Ostriches are the most familiar of the ratites. Such flightless birds date back at least 135 million years.

·      In regard to religion, Socrates spoke of gods in the plural. By that, he meant the traditional Greek deities.

·      Her reputation as a stubborn, refractory, and bull-headed individual doomed her chances to run for office.

·      Phobias are found in all age groups, and these irrational fears make life difficult for those who suffer from them.

 

(4) Examples or Description
         Quite often, a writer will not include an actual definition for an unknown word. However, if he or she has used examples or has described something closely connected with that word, it's almost as good as a definition -- if you're paying attention. When it comes to examples, look for signal words such as for example, for instance, such as, and like.

·      Misdemeanors, for example, include drunkenness, disorderly conduct, petty thefts, trespassing, and loitering in public places.

·      He exhibited misogynistic tendencies, such as constantly belittling women, denying their intelligence, and claiming that the only thing they were good for was having babies.

·      The contract was too convoluted. For instance, it required three signatures just to change an email address.

·      The stock market is very volatile, like a runaway horse bolting in unpredictable directions.

 

Descriptions, on the other hand, do not use signal words. Instead, you have to look for words that involve seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing. Pay attention and let the scene sink in to help you understand the meaning of a difficult or unknown word.

·      Delbert was emaciated. His clothes hung loosely from his frame. His arms and legs looked like toothpicks. His face looked like A Halloween skeleton mask. A strong wind would have blown him away.

·      There's a drug dealer who sits on the bench in a park near my house almost every day. His ears are oddly pointed, he has beady little red-rimmed eyes, a long snout, and sharp, razorlike teeth. His head is constantly twitching in nervous little jerks as if sniffing the air. He is the most murine-like person I have ever seen.

·      I'm never going to dine out with my cousin Bonnie again because she is so querulous. Last night, when the waiter greeted us with a smile and a cheery good evening, she snapped at him for being too familiar. When she learned that they had run out of lobster tail, her loud complaints reached every corner of the restaurant. When she paid her share of the bill, she complained that the cashier took way too much time to complete the transaction. And on the way out, she criticized the plants decorating the lobby.

 

(5) Contrasts or Opposites
         Sometimes a writer will highlight a word by emphasizing words that mean the opposite. In that case, you have to reverse the meaning 

WORD PARTS: letter sequences that always stay the same.

Here is the podcast version of this article.

Memorizing word parts is one of the best short cuts to increasing your vocabulary that I know of because while some word parts are recycled in dozens of words, others show up in hundreds of words, and a very few are ever used in thousands of words, though many of those are technical terms that we will never use. 

For instance, if I see the word telekinesis, I may have no idea what it means, but I have seen that -tele- part or sequence before in words such as television, telephone, and telescope -- all inventions that bring information to me from a distance. And that's what - tele- means: distant, far away, remote. (Telekinesis, by the way, is the supposed ability to move things without touching them by using your mind alone -- manipulation from a distance.)

This is why memorizing common word parts will increase your vocabulary: memorize them once, and every time they show up in a new word, you'll know at least half the meaning of that word, and you may be able to figure out the full meaning by studying the word's context -- the surrounding ideas and examples.

As an example, let's review a few useful word parts that you probably already know.

ANTE- means before, earlier, in front of

·      antedate, antecedent, antemeridian, antenatal, antebellum

ANTI- means against or opposed 

·      antifreeze, antiperspirant, antiseptic, antisocial, antiwar

HYPER- means over, above, excessive, intense

·      hyperactive, hyperexcitable, hyperconfident, hyperacidic, hyperbaric 

    HYPO- means under, lower, deficient

·      hypodermic, hypoactive, hypoxia, hypochondria, hypocrite, hypothesis

MACRO- means large, long, great in scale

·      macrocosm, macrobiotic, macrophage, macroeconomics, macroclimate

MICRO- means small, short, reduced in scale

·      microscope, microgram, microorganism, microphone, micropolitical

 

You'll find a useful and free list of word parts by looking up "common word parts" at The Writing Center at Southern Illinois University. Their list includes common prefixes (word parts at the beginning of a word), suffixes (word parts at the end of a word), and roots (word parts that come somewhere inside a word).
https://write.siu.edu/_common/documents/handouts/common-word-parts.pdf

MEDICAL
https://openmd.com/dictionary/medical-word-parts

https://www.tsc.fl.edu/media/divisions/learning-commons/resources-by-subject/science/anatomy-and-physiology/bsc2085/Terminology.pdf

 

But I have to issue a warning: word parts can sometimes be deceptive. Some word parts that are spelled the same or sound the same may come from totally different sources. Let's run through a couple of examples, then talk about what you can do to protect yourself. 

Let's consider the word part -ped-.

You already know that a pediatrician is a doctor who treats young children. And if you have ever owned a bicycle or driven a car, you know how to work the pedals with your feet. Obviously, the letter sequence -ped- appears in both words, but they are not at all connected. 

The -ped- in pediatrician comes from a Greek word that meant a child. It also shows up in words such as pediatrics (the branch of medicine that deals with children), pedagogy (the art of teaching youngsters), pedodontics (the branch of dentistry that specializes in children's teeth), and encyclopedia (a comprehensive educational work). 

But then there's the word pedal. The -ped- letter sequence there comes from a different Greek word that means foot. That meaning shows up in words such as pedicure (treatment of the foot), centipede (an insect with many feet), pedestrian (someone on foot), and pedometer (an app that tells you how many steps you have taken today).

So when you come across a new word containing the word part -ped-, how do you know if it refers to a child or to a foot? The unfortunate answer is that you can't tell just by looking at the spelling. You have to consider the context -- the ideas that surround the word that you're trying to decipher. So if you encounter a sentence that says, "Some statues have a pediform base rather than a square base," you can sense that it's talking about the shape of a foot, not the shape of a child. And if all else fails, you can always turn to a dictionary, especially an unabridged dictionary for technical or scientific words. If the word contains a recycled word part, you'll find that information in brackets (the square enclosure marks) at the end of the dictionary entry. 

Because context and word parts are dependent on one another, I've posted another podcast called CONTEXT, and I invite you to check it out.

Here is the text version of the Context article.

SILENT LETTERS: I see you, but I can't hear you

Here is the podcast version of this article: Podcast version of "Silent Letters"

Why don't we pronounce the B in debt and doubt, the P in psychology and psalm, the GH in night and dough, the S in island and viscount, the K in knife and knee, the L in talk and colonel, the E in time and pirate, and so on?

The answer is complicated, but let's see if we can simplify it a bit. In very old forms of English, many of these letters were actually pronounced. For instance, Chaucer wrote about a gentle knight (or soldier) in his Canterbury Tales, but he would have pronounced it as a gent-luh kuh-nikt. But over time, thanks to varying speech patterns in isolated parts of England, the sound changed -- and a spelling change would have soon followed except for the invention of the printing press, which froze the old ways in place. Centuries before the invention of radio and television, there was no uniform source of pronunciation; you heard what was common in your immediate surroundings, and that might have differed quite a bit if you had moved only a few hundred miles away.

Another reason is that English borrowed many words from other languages that already had silent letters built into their pronunciation, and felt obliged to save the original spelling, too. Words borrowed from French are a good example. For instance, the word queue, meaning a line of people waiting in line for something, is spelled q-u-e-u-e. The letter Q all by itself would spell the sound, but we keep the original spelling with an added u-e-u-e. Someone once wrote that English doesn't just politely borrow words; it goes out, clubs other languages over the head, and drags their unconscious remains into our word collection. It isn't always a neat and rational process, and it means that we have thousands of words with silent letters that serve no purpose.

A third reason is that in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, a group of influential British snobs decided that the English language had deteriorated to such a degree that drastic measures had to be taken to revive it. Since many of them were classically trained, they used Latin as their model for correct spelling and grammar. And so we had a reverse procedure: instead of effectively taking letters out of words by making them silent, these grammar gurus put letters back in based on Latin models. The English word dette (something you owe) became debt to acknowledge its source (the Latin debitum), and samoun (the fish) was changed to salmon to honor the Latin salmo.

So how do we handle this? I'm afraid that there is no easy way. There are some so-called rules based on common patterns, but there are just as many words that don't follow the rules. So we have to do a lot of memorizing to connect what we hear to what we see. And we just have to rely heavily on dictionary use when there is any doubt. (Whoops -- a silent B!)

HIDDEN FARTS: Silent But Deadly

Listen to this article on my podcast: https://rss.com/podcasts/wordmall/2676266/

The word fart, considered by many folks to be vulgar, is here to stay, as is the reality behind it. The word is classified as onomatopoeia, which means the sound of the word reflects what it is defining. Every language that I know has a word for it. They all tend to imitate what they hear as the sound, as sort of a fffft. 

I know that some people consider etymology the second most dismal science, but every once in a while, a fascinating revelation bursts forth. This happened to me recently as I looked up a word. The word was the seemingly innocent word partridge. 

   Partridges are members of the pheasant family. They eat insects, berries, seeds. They nest on the ground. They weigh less than a pound, but they can run very quickly, which saves them from many a predator.

Then came the shocker. The name partridge derived from a Greek verb, which from time immemorial has meant to fart. It's not so much this particular bird is prone to flatulence.It's just that the noise that it makes as it flies away reminded some people as a fart. That has to be some takeoff.

    Well, intrigued, I decided to do a wild card search on etymologies containing break wind, fart, flatulence. That's when a second surprise erupted. The German district of Westphalia was known for its pumpernickel, a coarse black bread not always fully appreciated.

    

In fact, in early modern German, pumper meant fart. As the Oxford English Dictionary delicately puts it, "this type of bread was probably so called either on account of its being difficult to digest and causing flatulence, or in a more general allusion to its hardness and poor quality." 

Hidden farts also lurk in the word feisty, aggressive and touchy, lycoperdon, a fungus puffball translated as wolf's fart, Onopordon, a genus of thistles translated as donkey fart, pedicule, a louse translated as small fart, and poop, from a German verb meaning to fart. 

Now I can't wait to have a partridge sandwich on pumpernickel. Pass the Beano®, please.

Phony Grammar Rules

The Dryden Code:

A Language Conspiracy Unmasked

I was an English teacher for 29 years. I saw it as my job--my profession--to uphold the standards and distinctions of English that mark the educated person. It was the least that I could do for my students.

It was only after retirement, when I finally had time to do some independent research and satisfy my curiosity, that I discovered that part of what I had done was to perpetuate language myths. They didn’t harm anyone, but they were part of a chain of beliefs that extended back to the 18^th century. Unwittingly, most English teachers repeat language commandments that they acquired in graduate school without ever having the opportunity to question them. I suspect that it’s true in other disciplines, too. At any rate, I’d like to focus on that aspect of language today.

Even though English had been in existence as a distinct language since the late 8^th or early 9^th century, no one bothered to standardize spelling and grammar until the 18^th century, and even then, there was no pressing need. The language had survived for 1,000 years without strict rules. In fact, that was what gave it strength. It was a sponge. It absorbed other languages and their features in an organic way. Taking the line of least resistance was what made English thrive. If strict rules had showed up early on in its history, today English would be a neat but dead language, like Latin, and it wouldn’t serve as the closest thing that the world has to a universal language.

Let me quickly review some time-honored grammar rules:

• Never use double negatives
• Never use double comparatives
• There should be a sanctioned spelling, a sanctioned pronunciation, and a sanctioned definition for each word in English.
• Be careful to distinguish who, which, and that
• Use shall with the pronoun I for simple future and use will to signal determination; reverse that for the 2^nd and 3^rd person
• Never end a sentence with a preposition
• Between signifies two items and among signifies three or more
• Never split an infinitive

I’m not normally a conspiracy buff, but I have stumbled across a 300 year old conspiracy that involves the origin of these rules.

Let me set the scene by quoting some of the more prominent early conspirators.

(1)  Poet John Dryden set the plot in motion. In 1672, referring to Shakespeare: “I dare almost challenge any man to show me a page together, which is correct in both sense and language.”   “And what correctness after this, can be expected from Shakespeare or from Fletcher, who wanted that Learning and Care which Ben Jonson had? I will therefore spare my own trouble of inquiring into their faults: who had they liv’d now, had doubtless written more correctly.”

(2) In 1697, novelist Daniel Defoe proposed an Academy to “advance the so much neglected Faculty of Correct Language, to establish Purity and Propriety of Stile, and to purge it from all the Irregular Additions that Ignorance and Affectation have introduced . . .”                       

(3)  In 1712, Jonathon Swift complained “. . .that our language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means perfect in proportion to its daily corruptions; that the Pretenders to polish and refine it have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and that in many instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar.” Swift also believed that “there is no absolute necessity why any language should be perpetually changing”

(4)  Conspirator #4, the Earl of Chesterfield, 1712: “It must be owned that our language is at present in a state of anarchy.” “Toleration, adoption, and naturalization have run their lengths. Good order and authority are now necessary.” 

(5)  Conspirator #5, Samuel Johnson, 1755: “. . .I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules; wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated . . .” “I have laboured to refine our language to grammatical purity, and to clear it from colloquial barbarisms, licentious idioms, and irregular combinations.”

Other writers, such as Joseph Addison, did not hesitate to use terms such as corrupt, unrefined, and barbarous when referring to English.

You can feel the indignation and sense the quivering lower lips. These men and others like them were humiliated by what they considered a degenerate language, and they planned to do something about it.

Words like chaos, anarchy, and unregulated abomination were not being tossed about lightly. In 18^th century England, there was a deep social phobia about disorder; this wasn’t mere hyperbole. After 150 years of social and political upheaval, the British were legitimately uneasy.

In that brief period, they had endured the Reformation, the dissolution of monasteries and the rise of life-threatening religious intolerance, the Gunpowder Plot, two civil wars, the execution of a king (Charles I) Irish and Scottish rebellions, three wars with the Dutch, the Restoration, the Great Plague and Fire of London, and the glorious revolution of 1688. And those pesky colonials in America were beginning to act up.

The desire to stabilize every facet of society, to restore order and predictability to everyday life, was the primary goal, the dream of a generation. And language was an easy target because of the large number of social climbers and newly rich yearning to be accepted into the upper or nearly upper class. [The current practice of awarding baronetcies was originally introduced in England and Ireland by James I of England in 1611 in order to raise funds.]

So here’s the core of the conspiracy: the gentlemen mentioned previously and two more about to be named made up the rules with which we started; they made them up! They chose them arbitrarily, ignoring historical precedent, and deliberately made it seem that there was no choice. Follow their rules and you were right; ignore their rules and you were wrong. It was that simple.

It all fell into place. The half century between 1750 and 1800 saw more English grammars published than in the previous two centuries.  And all of them attempted to repair what was seen as a severely damaged language. Two grammar books in particular set norms that lasted 300 years. Robert Lowth wrote A Short Introduction to English Grammar in 1762. By 1800 it had gone through 45 editions. His preface states that “The English language as it is spoken by the politest part of the nation, and as it stands in the writings of our most approved authors, oftentime offends against every part of grammar.”

His work inspired Lindley Murray to write English Grammar, Adapted to Different Classes of Learners in 1784. Murray was a New York lawyer who retired to Holgate, England. He wrote the grammar book for students at a local girls’ school. The book caught on like wildfire. It went through 200 editions by 1850 and sold over 20 million copies. [Gone with the Wind, one of the bestselling American novels in the last century, has sold approximately 28 million copies.] Most important, it influenced every grammar book written until the last half of the 20^th century.

Both Lowth and Murray clucked at the sloppy grammar of Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift and everyone else except themselves. Murray even criticized the King James version of the Bible, in one instance saying that “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever” ought to be “will follow me and I shall dwell. 

 Most of their choices were based on personal preference alone (“this is harsh; that sounds elegant.”) Occasionally they used the big stick: “this is how it is done in Latin.” The problem is, the structure of English has no connection to Latin structure. English is an analytic language; meaning depends primarily upon word arrangement. Latin is a synthetic language; meaning depends strongly upon word endings.

Notice what I am NOT saying: I am not saying that there are no rules. I am saying that a number of the so-called rules that have burdened us for 300 years have no basis in the language itself. Clarity and precision may be achieved without wooden-headed, inflexible rules, and clarity and precision are the hallmarks of good writing.

The so-called rules of language are simply brief, summary statements of currently accepted usage. Language is the result of human action, but not of human design. To try to fix it in place and prevent change is to turn it into a corpse on a morgue table.

Word Parts Dictionary, 3rd edition

Word Parts Dictionary, Kindle edition