Word imperfect
Here's a list of 20 words. Without looking them up, how many meanings can you honestly say you know?
abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany
Not terribly difficult, you probably think, but the answer doesn't really matter. Here's the rest of the list of 100 words all high school graduates and their parents ought to know, according to the editors of the American Heritage dictionary.
You may be wondering what earthly use it is to know words like circumnavigate or antebellum, which are only ever likely to crop up in history books, where you're likely to have easy access to a dictionary. Is there a value in knowing the meaning of obscure words that can only be used in very limited ways? Is there any value in using a word like antebellum in the first place? And why would the editors of a dictionary imply, as this list surely does, that it might be a bad thing to require recourse to their product?
Here are some wayward choices from the other 80% of the list:
evanescent
hypotenuse
loquacious
mitosis
plasma
quasar
and so on. An exercise in silliness, in my view. But it'll do great business, I'm sure, because it plays on people's insecurities. Most people will see a handful of the words on the list and have no idea what they mean, or only the vaguest notion. We're all ignorant to some extent, and that's the soft-spot this campaign is pressing on. It's pretty low-down marketing, when you think about it, though it's par for the course in the self-help world.
abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany
Not terribly difficult, you probably think, but the answer doesn't really matter. Here's the rest of the list of 100 words all high school graduates and their parents ought to know, according to the editors of the American Heritage dictionary.
You may be wondering what earthly use it is to know words like circumnavigate or antebellum, which are only ever likely to crop up in history books, where you're likely to have easy access to a dictionary. Is there a value in knowing the meaning of obscure words that can only be used in very limited ways? Is there any value in using a word like antebellum in the first place? And why would the editors of a dictionary imply, as this list surely does, that it might be a bad thing to require recourse to their product?
Here are some wayward choices from the other 80% of the list:
evanescent
hypotenuse
loquacious
mitosis
plasma
quasar
and so on. An exercise in silliness, in my view. But it'll do great business, I'm sure, because it plays on people's insecurities. Most people will see a handful of the words on the list and have no idea what they mean, or only the vaguest notion. We're all ignorant to some extent, and that's the soft-spot this campaign is pressing on. It's pretty low-down marketing, when you think about it, though it's par for the course in the self-help world.
