A Guest Post from Lorraine Segal
About Lorraine Segal
After surviving the ’50s and ’60s, as well as twenty years in toxic academia as a professor, Lorraine Segal was inspired to start her own business, Conflict Remedy, happily teaching, coaching, blogging, and consulting around workplace conflict transformation. She is addicted to reading novels and enjoys walking in beautiful Northern California, where she lives with her wife. Her cartoon muse, Bookie, insisted that she write her memoir, Angels and Earthworms. For more information go to https://BooklingPress.com
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In my eighth grade English class, we were supposed to read as many books as possible. Mr. Townsend had his own paperback library in the classroom and he
encouraged us to borrow. And we each had to keep a vocabulary notebook. When we came across a word we didn’t know in one of the books, or in a newspaper or on the radio, we had to write the word down, look up the dictionary definition, and quote a sentence which used the word in context. I found the process fascinating, and this began my lifelong love affair with words.
To this day, I love words and synonyms. In my professional writing and speaking, I do my best to use direct, simple, effective words, but when I’m feeling giggly and free, I use lots of the words that I used to call “big,” polysyllabic and complicated, because I get drunk on words!
Post-Mr. Townsend, I don’t think I formally studied words or meanings very much, at least in English, until graduate school. It was more of an organic process. Reading a novel, coming across a word I didn’t know, puzzling out the meaning from context, later encountering the word again and getting more ideas about the meaning. I will say that I enjoyed TV’s Jeopardy because I almost always knew some of the answers, partly because of my vocabulary, and partly because I have a huge grab bag of trivia about history and culture from reading so many novels.
And my two cents . . .
I guess being drunk on words is better than being drunk on some other things! I, like Lorraine, also love words. However, I remember as a student, I didn’t think I had much of a vocabulary. I don’t know when this changed, but I am pretty OK in that category now. Of course I always read a lot, but when I encountered a word I didn’t know, I think I might have been too lazy to look it up. However, I could sure spell well, probably because I read so much and once I saw a word, I could visualize it and “see” how it had been spelled.
I know we did a lot of spelling in grade school, and I think we did a lot of vocabulary after that. Of course the SAT exam has quite a bit of vocabulary. When I taught 7th grade English, I included a ton of vocabulary. We studied Greek and Latin roots, prefixes, and suffixes. There was no spelling or vocabulary textbook, but I gave the students words of the day and spelling/vocabulary tests. They needed to know how to spell the word, its part of speech, its definition, and how to use it in a sentence. Some of them did pretty poorly most of the time. They didn’t study.
I will never forget the day one of my top students in my advanced class brought me a word I had never heard of: defenestrate, which means to throw someone out of a window. I quickly added that word to their vocabulary list and to the list for years to come!
And speaking of Jeopardy, I used to watch it from time to time, but for the past year I have been a steady watcher. I watch while I exercise, and I record it in case I should miss it, I am a lost cause most of the time on the history and geography, but I can sometimes ace a word-related category!
This month I started doing a Word of the Day of new words added to the dictionary recently. You can see it if you follow me on Twitter or we are connected on LinkedIn or Facebook.
For a while I was doing a daily crossword puzzle.
I am not so great at Scrabble, which I rarely play, so maybe with practice…
Oh, and I play Wordle. Every. Day. I am pretty good at that.
When I taught middle school, I was fortunate enough to have a principal who encouraged us to use a workshop approach based on Donalyn Miller’s The Book Whisperer. Each kid was encouraged to read 40 books in a school year. Not all of them made it, but many did, and even those who didn’t read more than they would have otherwise.
I loved the concept so much I eventually wound up with a classroom library that contained over 1000 books. Good times until the next principal was concerned about only one thing–standardized test scores. Sad days indeed.
Glad I am not teaching anymore. Living here in Florida, all the good books are banned! Sad days indeed…hello, fascism.