Vocabulary Ramblings

A long time ago and far, far away, I worked in corporate America writing technical reports. Technical reports may be an exaggeration because we dumbed them down to an eighth grade reading level so Headquarters could understand them. My boss kept telling me to "use little words to explain it to their stupid asses." I did that very well, thankyouverymuch. So well, in fact, that I lost most of my 16-cylinder vocabulary words.

I get frustrated when I want to describe a beautiful something and the only adjective I can come up with is beautiful. Sigh. Some blogs I read have me running for the dictionary on a daily basis. Why don't I know what those words mean? Why, oh why, won't my brain think up those words when I need them? Did I live on the eighth grade reading level for so many years that my vocabulary gray matter died?

Writing for the common man has its pros and cons. If a piece is full of 16-cylinder words, the average Joe won't be able to understand it and thus won't read it. A writer wants to have their work read after all. When writing for a wide audience, simpler is better. The drawback of using simplistic words is the piece tends to be rather flavorless. The English language has beautifully exact words to convey a precise meaning, but if nobody knows what they mean, the whole idea has been lost. My problem is that I am stuck on simplistic. I need to expand and utilize a grown-up vocabulary.

Towards that goal I found a cool vocabulary game on-line at freerice.com. For every word you get correct, 10 grains of rice are donated to the United Nations World Food Program. I don't know about the rice donation business, but the vocab game is fun and challenging. I've made it to Level 45 of 50 and that was really stretching my brain cells. I didn't really know the words I was getting correct. I guessed at the meaning based on the Latin root of the word. I guess my guesses were pretty good.

Here are some words from the game:

Level 41 - candent, bibulous, luculent
Level 42 - stentor, complot, parvenu
Level 43 - trammel, mulct, execration
Level 44 - scaphoid, perspicacious, obloquy
Level 45 - parturient

I only got one shot at the Level 45 word and I missed it. The game dropped me back down to Level 44. Brownie points for anyone who can use scaphoid and parturient in the same sentence.

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I was composing an email earlier and I used the term alma mater. For some reason the spelling looked wrong. My brain kept reading it alma MATE-r instead of alma MOT-r. Alma Mater, sister to Tow Mater from the movie Cars. I kept hearing Larry the Cable guy say, "Yeah, he went to my alma MATEr." (Humm...this explanation would work out better if I had an audio clip.)

Well, anyway I went looking for the correct spelling of alma mater and got sidetracked on a tangent through Wikipedia. I always get lost in there reading all kinds of stuff that is only useful when playing Jeopardy. But I digress. What I found on Wiki was a new vocabulary word:

Incipit
The incipit of a text, such as a poem, song, or book, is its first few words or opening line. Before the development of titles, texts were often referred to by their incipits. Incipit comes from the Latin for "it begins". In the medieval period, incipits were often written in a different script or color from the rest of the work of which they were a part. Though incipit is Latin, the practice of the incipit predates classical antiquity by several millennia, and can be found in various parts of the world.

Yep, I would only need to know that if I had just selected Arcane Bibliographics for $800. But it was interesting nonetheless. Who knew there was a name for the first line of a text???

I also discovered this:

Many books in the Hebrew Bible are named in Hebrew using incipits. For instance, the first book is called Bereshit ("In the beginning ..."). The incipit has passed into English, "Genesis" being derived from the Greek translation of Bereshit.

Does a Bereshit in the woods? Alma Mater would like to know.

Yeah, I'm still in the eighth grade mindset. There may not be any hope for me.



By the way, this post was intended to be didactic.

And dangit, I couldn't come up with a cool "V" word to go with Vocabulary for the title of this ramble. Sigh.