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The Write Way 20 August 2004 A Word for Everything Greetings, As you know, each week I include a bit of a vocab quiz to help us all increase our word power because we really don't take advantage of all the wonderful words the English language has for us. Estimates vary, but writer R. McRoberts (in Media Workshop: Words) can't be far off the mark when he says there are around 800,000 words available to us in English. Well-educated people today use about 5,000 different words when speaking and about 10,000 in their writing. Most of us have a 'working vocabulary' of 2,000 (which means that there are over 788, 000 words that are gathering dust on the shelves of our minds). Of those 2,000 words, the most commonly used are: the, of, and, to, a, in, that, is, I, it. Those ten little words (and I do mean little), account for 25% of all speech. Then there are fifty words, which make up 60% of everything we say - and only two of these have more than one syllable. This list of the fifty most commonly used words is from the British National Corpus. The BNC is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of current British English, both spoken and written. ( http://www.rick.harrison.net/langlab/bncfreq.html )The survey of the British National Corpus, was prepared and made available by the Information Technology Research Institute at the University of Brighton. The material that was surveyed includes millions of words of transcribed conversation, printed text, and lectures and oratory. Notice that there are NO words of more than one syllable in the top fifty ...
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This week's quiz: Something a bit different this week ... to help make the most of those words you do know: Form nouns from these words: 1. phlegmatic 2. parsimonious 3. unctuous 4. magnanimous 5. ignominious Form adjectives from these: 6. delirium 7. clergy 8. provoke 9. contumely 10.omen This next little tale illustrates why it's so important to use the correct word ... The celebrant noticed that the bride was in great distress so asked her what was wrong. She replied that she was nervous and afraid she wouldn't remember what to do. The celebrant told her that she only needed to remember 3 things, "First the aisle, because that's what you'll be walking down. Secondly, the altar, because that's where you'll arrive. Finally, remember hymn, because that's a type of song we'll sing during the service." While the bride was walking to the wedding march, family and friends of the groom were horrified to hear her repeating these three words, " Aisle, altar hymn." Last week's quiz: 1. To 'thunder'; to denounce scathingly - FULMINATE "The root of this word, Latin fulmen, means "lightning," not "thunder" ... but why spoil a good story? In the Middle Ages, Latin fulminare was the technical term for a formal condemnation or censure by the pope or other church authority. Now, however, anyone is free to fulminate." 2. Excessively sentimental; having a faint, sickly taste - MAWKISH "Although mawkish often describes something excessively sweet, this word originally referred to something far less tasty: maggots. "The obsolete English mawk means "maggot," and mawkish is now used to describe a person who feels nauseated and to something "nauseating" or characterised by "a faint sickly taste." As so often happens, mawkish lost its early vividness, and now just means "feebly sentimental" or "faintly sickly-tasting."" 3. To throw something or someone out of a window - DEFENESTRATE "Although these days you can defenestrate just about anything that'll fit through a window, this word first applied to history's most famous such tossing-out, which occurred in Prague in 1618. "Angry at a lack of religious freedom, Protestant insurgents broke up a meeting of royal officials in Hradcany, the Prague Castle, then went on to express their extreme displeasure by tossing two officials and their secretary out a window. Those thus defenestrated weren't seriously hurt, however. (Depending on which account you read, this is either because they were tossed out of a window that was relatively low, or landed in a moat, or perhaps both)." It's also a computing jargon term for "the act of exiting a window system in order to get better response time from a full-screen program" or "the act of discarding something under the assumption that it will improve matters" or "the act of dragging something out of a window (onto the screen.)" Defenestrate comes from Latin fenestra, meaning "window," and is therefore a relative of words for "window" in several other languages, including French fenêtre, German Fenster, and Italian finestra. 4. Flitting about from one thing to another; disjointed, disconnected; not methodical - DESULTORY "In Roman times, a desultor was a circus entertainer who would leap from the back of one horse to another. This name derives from desilire, meaning "to leap down." "(Desultor shares a common linguistic ancestor with several other "leaping" words as somersault.)" 5. A drop of mucus at the end of the nose - MELDROP "Here's one of those isn't-it-nice-to-know-there's-a-word-for-it words. "Meldrop" comes from an Old Norse term for "a drop or foam from a horse's mouth."" 6. A remark that occurs to someone only later, after the fact; the thing you should have said, but didn't think of - ESPRIT D'ESCALIER "This wonderful French expression literally translates as "wit of the staircase." The English quickly recognized its usefulness, and had adopted it by the early 1900s. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations defines esprit d'escalier as: "An untranslatable phrase, the meaning of which is that one only thinks on one's way downstairs of the smart retort one might have made in the drawing room."" 7. Cheap and showy, gaudy. Of persons: low, mean, or base -TAWDRY "Like many women of her day, the seventh-century Anglian princess Etheldreda was betrothed against her wishes. So, understandably, she fled to the Isle of Ely in the middle of the river Ouse, just north of Cambridge, England. "There she established a religious house, served as its abbess, and eventually was canonized as St. Audrey. She died in 679 due to a throat tumour, which St. Audrey herself declared was divine punishment for the vanity of her youth, when she was overly fond of fine neckwear. In honor of St. Audrey, the townsfolk of Ely held an annual fair, where merchants hawked frilly lace scarves they called St. Audrey's lace. Over time, this expression shortened to tawdry lace. Soon tacky imitations abounded, giving tawdry its later connotation of "cheap and pretentious." 8. Weak, helpless, ineffectual, futile - FECKLESS "This word comes from Scotland (where its opposite, feckful, means "efficient, vigorous, powerful"). Feckless comes from the Scots dialect term feck, a shortened version of the word effect." 9. An abnormal sensation that ants are crawling over one's skin -FORMICATION (and no, it's not a typo!) "The term formication derives from the Latin word formica, or "ant."" 10.Extremely severe; harsh; cruel - DRACONIAN "Draco was an Athenian legislator, who in 621 B.C. received special authority to codify existing laws that had never been formally written down. Although his aim was to ensure a more uniform system of justice, the result was that he made those laws especially severe, such as mandating the death penalty even for trivial crimes." I found this wonderful collection of words and origins here: http://www.funwords.com/archive.htm Our Map of the World has some fascinating glimpses into the places our Merry Band call home. Drop by if you haven't been back for some time: http://pub37.bravenet.com/guestmap/view.php?usernum=3170114826 A Little Something Extra Want to know just how far those marathon runners run, how much beer is in a schooner or how many bees make up a bee space? Do you need a word to describe a measurement? Any measurement? Then you need the Dictionary of Units of Measurement: http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/index.html Word of the week: Abligurition (n) extravagance in cooking and serving food; overindulgence. This beauty comes from the Latin abligurire to spend in luxurious indulgence. Oxymoron of the week: countless numbers This week's Latin phrase is one I'm sure you'll be able to use this weekend ... Amoto quaeramus seria ludo. (Joking aside, let us turn to serious matters.) Regards, Jennifer P.S. Want to donate to the upkeep of this newsletter? Here's how: 1. Pay by PayPal:
2. Click here to subscribe for a full year OR 3. Use your credit card on my secure order form: http://www.write101.com/fund.htm (You can also access the PayPal subscription link from this page if the link above didn't work for you. With PayPal, you can use your credit card, PayPal account or pay online using your own cheque account.) OR 4. Send a cheque (made payable to Jennifer Stewart): http://www.write101.com/fund.htm To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: mailto:WritingTips-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com or go to the web site, at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WritingTips This menu will also let you change your subscription between digest and normal mode. Copyright 2004 Jennifer Stewart Individual articles copyrighted by
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