Re: Words every high school graduate should know...

"Alan Jones" <atj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
K. Edgcombe wrote:
Mark Barratt <nyelvmark@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

For the record, words that I don't know or aren't sure about
(I=20 haven't looked at the answers yet) are:
"epiphany", "evanescent", "fiduciary", "jejune",
"lugubrious",=20 "moiety" and "quotidian". 93/100.

I think you're the second person who reports being unsure about
"lugubrious". Maybe this is pondial; I would have thought it was
one of the best-known words in the list. FWIW, I got all my 25
except that I was not at all confident about "hegemony" (I got it
right but that was rather a surprise). Moreover, I don't know
how to pronounce it.

Nor I a few minutes ago, but I looked it up. NSOED says that the g
may be hard or soft, and that the stress is on -gem-. But I've
occasionally heard it occasionally with initial stress.

I wonder how the high school student is expected to have learnt
these words.

"Hegemony" has been in the news for the past forty or fifty years. I
learned it in high school fifty years ago. The Soviets and Red
Chinese talked a lot about it. It's one of their propaganda words.

The other words one is supposed to learn from reading books that have
substance instead of a plethora of illustrations. Education is about
learning things, e.g. words, that one does not already know, not
about hearing the same old newspeak phrases over and over again in
sitcoms and vacuous action-movies with vocabularies restricted to
"***" and "motherfucker", or to MTV and American Idol type shows
that eschew words and glorify appearance.

Most of my high school teachers were educated men and women who knew
the meanings of the words on that list and how to use them. We had to
read lots of difficult books with difficult words, and some of us
even chose to read novels, poetry, and dramas and history,
psychology, economics, anthropology, philosophy, theology, biology,
and sociology books that were not assigned by our teachers.

I wonder how you can have asked such a fatuous question.

--
Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor
Native speaker of American English; posting from Taiwan.
"Machines are rational because they unemotionally do what they're
told to do without making value judgments about what they do. Humans,
on the other hand, are irrational because they constantly make value
(i.e., emotional) judgments, even about natural functions that need
not be judged. That's both politics and pretention (also
'pretension')." Anymouse.


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