[AGL] for my english lit friends

[michele mason]

Connie, I'm no an English lit, but I do enjoy words. In fact, it seems  
to have become a true romance. Thanks, I really enjoyed the piece.   mm

On Jan 24, 2007, at 11:55 AM, Connie Clark wrote:


> Well I didn't know that a marble made a plash, not a splash, but the  

> rest of them I've heard before - arrant - for some reason hardly ever  

> see it in print.

>

>

> Jan. 24, 2007, 9:49AM

> Hard words in famous 'kid' story

>

> By LEON HALE

> Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

>

> One of the customers has asked whatever happened to the hard-word  

> tests we used to have here every few months.

> What happened is that I stopped those tests because the customers kept  

> complaining that they didn't like them, that the words were way too  

> uppity and the average reader didn't have any use for them.

> I always liked those tests. Don't worry, though, I'm not about to  

> start them up again.

> But now and then one of the customers who also liked the tests will  

> mail me a word quiz and invite me to see how I do on it.

> The most recent came from Georgia Herreth of Bay City. She was reading  

> what she calls a well-known children's story, written by a famous  

> author, and she was impressed by the vocabulary. So am I.

> I'm not sure I agree that this yarn qualifies strictly as a children's  

> story. I doubt many 10-year-olds would get past the first couple of  

> paragraphs.

> My best recollection is that I was exposed to it in junior high  

> school, or maybe in high school a year or so later, and my bunch was a  

> long way from adulthood then. So it's not wrong to call it a  

> children's story but it's more than that. It's a classic.

> Anyhow, Georgia Herreth sent me 20 words from the story, and invited  

> me to see how many on the list I know. Surely a guy in the word  

> business would be familiar with all the words in a story studied by  

> multitudes of young students, right?

> Wrong. Nine words on the list were strange to me:

> Roystering. Rantipole. Gorget. Queued. Ratiocination. Arrant. Plashy.  

> Choleric. Withe.

> That string of sweethearts sent me into Webster's Third New  

> International, and I was in there a considerable while.

> Start with roystering. Dictionary says, "Characterized by or  

> associated with noisy revelry." Webster likes the word spelled with an  

> i rather than that y.

> Rantipole. "A wild, reckless, sometimes quarrelsome person." So you  

> might become a rantipole if you went out roystering.

> Gorget is the name of a piece of armor protecting the throat. Also an  

> ornamental collar, a scarf, or a splash of color at the throat,  

> especially of a bird.

> Queued. Did this one fool you? It did me. It's nothing but the past  

> tense of the verb queue, meaning to get in line. Queue has an oddball  

> appearance to begin with, and when you add that d the word looks like  

> leftovers in an alphabet soup bowl.

> Ratiocination. Which means logical and methodical reasoning. Maybe I'd  

> have nailed that one if I could have seen it used in a sentence, but I  

> don't have before me a copy of the story.

> Arrant. This is an adjective that doesn't get around much any more.  

> Dictionaries say it means "completely such." Like if you have a  

> neighbor who's a total, purebred and registered scoundrel, he's an  

> arrant scoundrel.

> Plashy. Mr. Webster says this means "abounding with pools or puddles."  

> It can also mean "marked by plashes," which are small splashes. If you  

> do a cannon ball into the swimming pool you'll make a splash, but if  

> you drop a marble into it you'll just cause a plash.

> Choleric. I figured surely this one has to do with bad health because  

> it certainly looks like a sick word. But when used outside a hospital,  

> it means "easily moved to anger." Hot tempered, that is.

> Withe. A withe turns out to be a slender, flexible branch or twig used  

> for winding around things, to bind them.

> Some of the other words in that children's story were pedagogue,  

> peradventure, ferule, mettle, syllogism, tractable, pertinacious and  

> approbation. I'm sure you're familiar with all those and use them  

> daily in casual speech, so I won't bother with definitions.

> Due to the hints I've dropped, some of the customers may have already  

> seen that the story in question is Washington Irving's The Legend of  

> Sleepy Hollow, starring Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman. It  

> was first published in 1820.

> Who knows what age reader Irving had in mind when he wrote this story?  

> If he was aiming at children, he sure didn't worry about writing down  

> to them.

> Since I began this I've seen a Web site called Edsitement that offers  

> teachers a lesson plan on the Sleepy Hollow story. Plan suggests that  

> students be divided into groups, to help each other deal with Irving's  

> vocabulary.

> http://blogs.chron.com/leonhale

>

>

>

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