The 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know, published by Houghton Mifflin, include some doozies. If you get out of 12th grade without knowing the meaning of “moiety” or “jejune” are you crippled for life?
“The words we suggest,” says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, “are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.”
I’m vague on “quasar.” It’s a cool-sounding sciencey type thing. That has been enough to see me through. Nor have I dropped “ziggurat” or “gamete” into my conversation lately.
The gametes in the other moiety were climbing the jejune
ziggurat to observe the quasar?
I fail to see how *these* 100 words made the list and other
equally obscure ones did not.
Maybe we should publish a book, “100 words you don’t need
to know because they just don’t matter.”
-Mark Roulo
This is meant to be a test, not a study list. If a person can use these words properly, it is a predictor of English language mastery. I’m sure Houghton Mifflin would agree that there are thousands of other words that could have made the list.
I find it interesting that they are describing the words as “benchmarks”, which suggests they they have done research showing that knowledge of these words is related to other measures of mastery of the language. The way it’s being presented here, though, students could be forgiven for assuming that all they have to do is memorize these words and that in and of itself improves their overall mastery of the language. What would be more useful is the research behind this list, so we could better understand the components that help a student get to the point where they encounter these words in their reading and are able to understand them and use them properly.
In other words, it’s not whether or not you know the word, “jejune”, it’s whether you’ve worked on your literacy skills by reading the type of material that uses that word.
I agree with the list. Any well-educated high school graduate should know those words. In fact, I agree so much I have my kids memorize the defintions/sentences of 7500 words over a ten year period with constant review (ages 6-16) for this very reason.
It was interesting to spent 15 minutes checking these 100 words against my list to see if I lacked any. A few of the technical ones I lacked (I just added them) and only one non-technical word “kowtow” was missing. I just added that too.
Hard truth: if a student masters just four things: mathematics, deep reading, vocabulary, and writing, he will sit at the top of the heap in college in every subject. Sadly, it hard to teach the vocabulary part in schools, as this must be learned over the long haul, year in and year out, during which time students pass from one educational philosophy and teacher to another.
When I was in college I “prepared” for the GRE by reading a dictionary a half hour a night for some months. I had a much larger vocabulary for a few years, but I lost most of it because I was constantly using words that no one around me knew, and so I stopped using them and then forgot them. I recall referring to something as “purfling” once, and getting a lot of blank stares. I can’t say that my career has suffered, but I probably would need a dictionary handy to read Henry James novels (not that I’m likely to again), and at the time I didn’t.
hardlyb,
You make a good point: vocab is a “use it or lose it” kind of deal.
A large vocabulary does have considerable real-world value when writing, I believe, more so than when speaking. Using the right word in the right place can make an otherwise confusing, lengthy, and ugly sentence sound smooth. But to do this, the word has to be fully ingrained in the writer’s lingo to be of any use. My favorite quote here is some Stephen King snark: Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. Unfortunately, the only way a student learns vocabulary to this level is to use words they have already learned, day after day. This is one of the reasons the GRE is so vocabulary laden; it’s mighty hard to cram for a lifetime of vocabulary. And also why 90% of student vocabulary study is a waste of time.
If Gwendolyn Brooks had been born a Hilton:
We jejune.
We die soon.
Nels Nelson: “This is meant to be a test, not a study list.” Correct, but now it IS a study list, so many kids will know these words and nothing else.
This sounds like a topic for Kimberley.