Hooked on Words

When I was in college I had a professor who wrote a newspaper column on the etymology of words. I was majoring in Spanish and English at the time and I was already hooked on idioms, cognates, word derivations, linguistics, etc. This particular prof inspired me to really think about individual words and pay attention to their families. When I taught my beginning Spanish students that “fácil” meant “easy” and “difícil” meant hard, I would draw their attention to the English counterparts “facilitate” and “difficult”. Unfortunately, not many kids knew that facilitate means “to make easy”. Oh, well, it was then my mission to increase their English vocabularies as well as teach them Spanish. I did some research and found that students that graduated in the 50’s and 60’s had a vocabulary of about 25,000 words. In the 90’s it was down to about 10,000. I have a photo copy of a page from the Detroit News (March 26, 1933) and I scanned for words that high school students would not know and found many, among them “paroxysm”, “biliousness” and “piker” (and these were from letters to the editor!). When I write children’s novels I try to work in good strong vocabulary in a way that will help them unconsciously learn new words. Can that be done? Sure. Example: (For a 4th or 5th grader who didn’t know the meaning of “escapade”) From The Secret in the Hidden Cave: Missy was out of breath more from tension than the short run from the lodge. “Kevin’s trapped in the caves!” she blurted out and then poured out the rest of their escapades. She told him about (spoiler), (spoiler), the explosion, and ended with the fact that Jessica was grounded in her room. Sorry about the spoilers, nevertheless, having written about four adventures / antics / incidents / experiences in the next sentence, the reader learns what an escapade is. Incidentally, escapade is in the “escape” family. Think about it.