May 31, 2007
Are these words important? You be deciduous!
Mr. Kottke linked to the new book 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know with the sneer, “Alternate title: 100 mostly useless words.”
Here’s the complete list.
I would never buy this book in a million years, but that’s not because I think these words are “mostly useless.” Some of them, though, you’d have to have been totally playing hooky to get through high school without, no? For example,
chromosome
circumnavigate
deciduous
equinox
gerrymander
hypotenuse
impeach
kinetic
laissez faire
photosynthesis
respiration
suffragist
And others, though perhaps not as widely used as they should be, are very far from useless, or even uncommon. It’s quicker to pick out the words I don’t use or often read than to list the ones I do, but I can’t imagine doing without these:
auspicious
facetious
feckless
homogeneous
impeach
incognito
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
lugubrious
metamorphosis
obsequious
omnipotent
plagiarize
precipitous
reciprocal
subjugate
tempestuous
totalitarian
usurp
vehement
What do you think? Is the book useful or useless? Are the words in it useful or useless?
comments
8 Responses to “Are these words important? You be deciduous!”
To say that those words are useless is simply doubleplus ungood.
There are people who would be happy to have all written communication boiled down to text messaging and smilies, and spoken communication reduced to clicks and whistles.
It’s the averaging of mental resources, and it takes the pressure off of those who can’t be bothered to learn better words for…things. They want to do to vocabulary what McDonald’s did to food.
Another beef I have with this list is that for a lot of those words in my you-must-have-played-hooky selection, the important thing is to know the concept, not so much the word for the concept. Like, when was the last time I needed the word “photosynthesis”? It’s been years. But ya gotta understand that most plants need light, or bad things will happen.
There’s cultural or numerical or scientific literacy, and then there’s literacy literacy. The editors of this book don’t seem to have been able to decide which kind of literacy they were selling.
I’ve been caught sneering in public and I’m here to defend myself.
The useless remark was flip and imprecise; my problem is more with the list than the words on it. A list such as this emphasizes a certain type of learning (big vocab, know your multiplication tables, high IQ, do well on standardized tests, etc.) and the unspoken-but-hinted-at implication in offering it up as a baseline for successful completion of a secondary education strikes me as unhelpful. If the list was called 100 Words Every Future Novelist, Journalist, Orator, Expresser Of Ideas, Or Persuader Of People Who Wish To Express Themselves Using A Certain Type Of Language Should Know, I’d feel much better about it. That way, the folks who don’t need to know what “lugubrious” means can use their non-lexical gifts to the advantage of society and themselves without worrying about if they “failed” high school or not.
Thanks for elaborating. I think we’re agreed, then, that it sounds like a useless book.
Next question: Are people who know the meaning of the word “lugubrious” more likely than others to be acquainted with lugubrious people? Because I find that I need that word pretty often.
For what it’s worth, lugubrious has been on my list of essential words since I was about 15. Best use: Emma Thompson describes Hugh Laurie as being “lugubriously sexy, rather like a well-hung eel.”
[reeling]
leguminous is close and has the right implication of odor; I’m sure you could pass it off….
Although “people who know the meaning of the word ‘lugubrious’” do not use it in place of ‘lubricious’, amongst people I know they often come to the same thing.