Open Mike: The Best Way to Get Smart (OT)

I especially enjoyed the reader comments to Wednesday's post. A range of opinion and some really fascinating insights.

That post simply started out as a link—a link to David Brooks' article "You Are Not Who You Think You Are." (Brooks is a conservative columnist at the New York Times—but old-style conservative*.)

So then take a look at two links that I found waiting for me this morning:

"[The Simpsons] specious reasoning," suggested by Jim Arthur,

and

The Backfire Effect, from The Oatmeal, suggested by Bob G. Note that there is a profane and a clean version of this, with the controls directly beneath the first panel. Choose for yourself, but be aware that once you choose the clean version you can't click back to the version with profanity.

Isn't that delightful? Nice little juxtaposition to find in the Comments panel on a beautiful November morning.

I really get a lot out of the comments. I've always thought it's a toss-up whether TOP readers get more from TOP or I get more from you!

Just this made me smile big-time, from longtime reader Mike Plews, a response to the fact that George Foreman named all five of his sons after himself: "My middle grandchild Gus loves turtles. His room is full of stuffed and toy ones. They are all named Frank. Love that kid."

You'd kinda have to, am I right? Go, Gus. (Let's have a pic of Gus and all the Franks sometime, eh Mike?)

Greek?
By the bye, I suspect "specious" should be nominated as the Word of Our Times. It means "superficially plausible, but actually wrong," or "misleading in appearance, especially misleadingly attractive."

What struck me when reading that first definition, "superficially plausible, but actually wrong," is one of my longtime, strongly-held beliefs: that the best way for kids to get smart—really, the best way—is for them to study vocabulary. That such study doesn't require talent or innate ability is a bonus—anybody can improve their vocabulary, starting from any level. Here's the funny thing that inspired that thought: to understand that first definition, you have to know what "superficially" and "plausible" both mean!

You know how sometimes people make a joke of the way dogs supposedly hear us, like "blah blah blah Rover blah blah blah blah Rover"? Well, the same thing happens to humans a lot. A sentence composed of words unknown to a particular reader—for example:

"Her pelucid epistle exacerbated his umbrage at her calumny."

...Reads pretty much the same way as "dog-hearing" to people who don't know the words. To the average-vocabularied middle schooler, for instance, that sentence might read, approximately, as...

"Her διαυγής επιστολή επιδεινώθηκε his δυσαρέσκεια at her συκοφαντία."

My point will be lost on Greek speakers, because, in honor of our expression "It's all Greek to me," I substituted the hard words in that sentence for their approximate Greek equivalents, courtesy of Google Translate. The point is, when a writer's meaning hinges on one or more words the reader doesn't know, you can insert "blah blah" in place of the unknown word or words. Communication will likely fail.

Writers get around this by putting the same ideas in simpler words. In our case that might be:

His anger over her saying nasty things about him was made worse by her all-too-clear letter.

By the bye, The phrase "It's Greek to me," meaning I cannot understand it, was coined in English by, who else, Shakespeare, who used it in Julius Caesar in 1599. Back then, aristocratic children were taught Greek as a central part of their educations. Of course, Will the Bard might have simply been translating an old Latin phrase, Graecum est; non potest legi—which means, "It is Greek, so it cannot be understood." As late as the nineteenth century, salting one's prose with untranslated tidbits in Greek and Latin was a common (and snooty) way of asserting the writer's status with a loaded compliment to the reader—as if to say, you read Greek, naturally, don't you? I don't have to bother to translate this for you, do I? Used to drive me nuts.

New and old dogs
You're never too old to learn vocabulary. I would say that I look up a word or two on most days of my life. You can just type "Calumny def" into Google, for example, and up it comes. I like reading a variety of definitions, too. We lighted on a very troublesome word this week, "redaction."

Believe it or not, one of the identifiable groups with the highest vocabulary levels is corporation presidents and CEOs. Higher than lawyers, professors, and yes, even than writers. If you're wondering if your 7th or 8th grader will take to a suggestion that he or she should learn vocab, just point out that vocabulary correlates to earning power!**

Of course, to be impressed with that, your middle schooler will need to understand what "correlates" means.  :-) 

The best way to start a middle schooler on learning vocabulary is to go to the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation Vocabulary Resource page, have them take the placement test, then start 'em on the Word Books. Their more prosperous future awaits.

Have a nice weekend! Say a prayer, and do something nice for somebody. See you back here with new content on Monday.

Mike

*Another painful example of American Irony: classical liberalism is what traditional conservatives sought to conserve.

**Roughly, but still, it does.

Book o' the Week

Photography, The Definitive Visual History by Tom Ang. This is a book that can't exist—it's too much work to put it together, like several others I know of (I'm looking at you, Q.T. Luong). Amazingly, it exists anyway. A brightly-lit shop window for the attractions of photography—a whirlwind tour of people, cameras, and pictures. The author still has time to be an accomplished travel photographer, although I don't know how.

The above is a link to Amazon from TOP. Once you're at Amazon, anything you search and buy will be credited to TOP. The following logo is also a link:

Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Frank Gorga: "'...The best way for kids to get smart—really, the best way—is for them to study vocabulary'... AGREED! In my experience (both my own and in raising two, now middle-aged, offspring) the best way to increase vocabulary is to encourage reading. And...the best way to encourage reading is to remove the television(s) from your home. We did this when our kids were preschoolers roughly thirty five years ago and have never missed it. As for your example sentence, I had to look up 'pelucid' and 'calumny.' Thanks for the stimulus to add to my vocabulary today! Alas, calumny is, I fear, a word that might be quickly overused given the current state of the world!"

Antonis R: "Oh, thank God you provided a proper translation in Greek; otherwise, it would have all been Chinese to me!
(That's the actual expression used in Greek to say 'it's all Greek to me.')

"谢谢, er...ευχαριστώ, I mean, thank you!"

Peter Croft: "For the past few years I've been using Etymology Online as my lookup source. I like knowing how a word has been derived. I recommend it. By the way, Mike, in the past 20 years or more, I've noticed a major trend in language, not just in your writing but almost universally. I don't know the technical term for it, but it's to omit the first word of statements. For example, from above: 'Used to drive me nuts'. 'It' is missing. There are many examples and I'm not criticising you, I'm just making an observation. And I'm sorry, it will drive you nuts now.  :-) "

Mike replies: I write mostly in sentences, but I also like to be casual and I like to play around with words, so there are times when correctness sounds stuffy or formal.

Have you noticed how adverbs are going by the wayside? As in, "he did that perfect." Comma splices are epidemic, I find them annoying (you saw what I did there). And of course we are losing, or should I say loosing, the loose vs. lose battle, which is probably my pet peeve (out of all my peeves).

I should admit I actually don't know anything about grammar. I just do everything by ear. My education in grammar spanned three days. Our eighth grade English teacher was a gentleman teacher (meaning, he was a wealthy fellow at loose ends who volunteered, something that used to be fairly common at private prep schools) who asked us if we would like to learn grammar. We voted yes, so he dove in, and then after three days we voted again and said thank you but that's quite enough of that. So that's the extent of my formal schooling in grammar.

The teacher's name was Sandy McCallum; his son Jack is an accomplished writer mostly about sports. Mr. McCallum started me on my path to becoming a writer.

David Dyer-Bennet: "Huh; the best way to improve your vocabulary is to read. Seeing words used makes them yours a lot more powerfully than seeing them in a vocabulary list!"

Mike replies: That's a good way and an important aspect of the task, of course, but I would quibble that it's not the "best" way. The best way (according to Prof. Johnson O'Connor, who researched it extensively) is to read a discursive explanation of the word—meanings, distinctions of meanings, usage, etymology, examples, etc. That's why he wrote his English Vocabulary Builders, which catalogue words in order of difficulty and discuss each in turn. He recommended reading one new page a day and reviewing the previous two days' words.

Comments

[Albert Smith]

I think that the way we had to do it in the pre-internet days made the process of learning a vocabulary more effective. The physical process of looking up a word in the actual dictionary involved more sensory input from the person doing it and IMO made a more long lasting imprint in the brain. You learned so you didn't have to keep repeating the process of looking up the same word over and over.

Googling something is so quick and uninvolved (auto-complete makes it so that you rarely need to type the whole word) that the "learning" is fleeting and you'd be lucky to remember that you looked it up the next time that you came across the same "unfamiliar" word.

[Moose]

. . . the best way for kids to get smart—really, the best way—is for them to study vocabulary.

This egregious misuse of the noun smart is all too common.

I suspect that what you meant is . . . the best way for kids to know a great deal really, the best way—is for them to study vocabulary.

Essential Meaning of smart, from Merriam Webster:

1 chiefly US : very good at learning or thinking about things : intelligent

2 : showing intelligence or good judgment : wise

3 informal + disapproving : behaving or talking in a rude or impolite way : showing a lack of respect for someone

From The Free Dictionary:

1.
a. Having or showing intelligence; bright.

b. Canny and shrewd in dealings with others: a smart negotiator.

2.
a. Amusingly clever; witty: a smart quip; a lively, smart conversation.

b. Impertinent; insolent: That's enough of your smart talk.
-------------------
Nowhere do they suggest that being good at Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit, being a great speller or even having an extensive vocabulary, is a part of being smart/intelligent.

Yes, I understand "Her pelucid epistle exacerbated his umbrage at her calumny."

And I am good at crosswords, but do not consider those capabilities to be part of smart. Neither would you, if your vocabulary were accurate.

[Benjamin Marks]

My father-in-law has one of the widest vocabularies of anyone I know. For a good long while, a hobby of his was working for the OED combing through scans of early printed works and identifying first iterations or uses of particular words. Yup. That's what he did for fun.

On a related note, I am taking a class to certify as an EMT for my local volunteer fire department. Along the way, we have to learn a LOT of medical terminology. Two observations: First, I know a lot of it already because of specific ailments suffered by myself, friends, and family (which would be pretty funny, if the absence of my bilateral menisci weren't causing my articular cartilage to slowly grind away). Second: while I appreciate the need for specificity, I can't help feeling that much of the vocab exists to insulate the medical priesthood from the rest of us slack-jawed mouth breathers. Honestly: you have to auscultate the pulse to take a blood pressure reading? Honestly . . .:rolleyes:

[Rob de Loe]

Let me bring your post right back to photography. The idea's are absolutely relevant.

Today's session in my course had the students critiquing each others' "Day in the life of..." exercises. It was lots of fun: they're terrifically constructive while not pulling punches.

I tell them not to get defensive when it's their work being evaluated. In one group, it was starting to sound like the presenter was getting defensive, but it turned out he was genuinely puzzled. He approached me afterwards and noted, "I just learned that most people in this class don't know much about biology".

In a nutshell, he made a "Day in the life" project that required the viewer to have his level of understanding of avian biology, and they did not, so the pictures in the series made no sense to his audience.

His next comment was, "Clearly I'm going to have to make some adjustments to the pictures for my major project."

Bam! Someone just learned something extremely important about the importance of using visual concepts (vocabulary) in our images that make sense to the intended audience.

[Jeff]

Your earning power should be phenomenal, Mike!

Incidentally, Foreman didn’t follow the same naming protocol with his seven daughters. And his sons’ names were distinguished by suffixes (and nicknames), as described on Wikipedia and on Foreman’s website…

“Foreman has 12 children: five sons and seven daughters. His five sons are George Jr., George III ("Monk"), George IV ("Big Wheel"), George V ("Red"), and George VI ("Little Joey"). On his website, Foreman explains, "I named all my sons George Edward Foreman so they would always have something in common. I say to them, 'If one of us goes up, then we all go up together, and if one goes down, we all go down together!'"

[Matt Kallio]

In some high school class six decades ago I was fortunate to work through "Thirty Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary" and it was just as you described: learn one word and you learn all sorts of stuff ("oh, so there's a word for that..."). Never resulted in much wealth though.

[Gerard Geradts]

"Of course, to be impressed with that, your middle schooler will need to understand what "correlates" means. :-) "

A smart middle-schooler might respond by telling that there is no need for this learning of new Vocabulary, because when I get rich this will come on its own.

Correlation on the one hand and cause and effect on he other........

[Edward Taylor]

This may be how we got to where we are when it comes to people's limited vocabulary:

Many years ago I was a writer - mostly for newspapers. Whenever I needed to write about something nuanced, I would reach into my vocabulary to try and express exactly what I meant. Invariably, the editor would cross out what I wrote, hand it back to me, and tell me to write it over so that it could be understood by someone with sixth-grade reading ability.

I would tell him that we should write for readers who had a good vocabulary because that way we could communicate more effectively with words. He would say that if no one understands what you are saying, then you are not communicating at all.

As a result, we are not exposed to too many interesting words anymore, and having a broad vocabulary is not necessary to understand most of the dumbed-down things we read. It is a shame really.

[Not THAT Ross Cameron]

I can appreciate Edward Taylor’s experience. For writing at work I like to keep a link to OED and Thesaurus.com in my shortcuts. It’s mainly to try and find “le mot juste”, when I can’t recall the particular word I want.
I once used the word ameliorate in a document. My managers liked the document, but spent an inordinate amount of time mulling over whether to include that word.
I had a go at the vocabulary placement test, just for the fun of it. The first 7 groups were easy, but I stumbled up on Group 8. Contrary to David Dyer-Bennet’s comment, I would suggest that simply reading lots won’t necessarily improve one’s vocabulary. I used to read quite a lot (before young family and career) and not just fiction. I recognised many of the words in Group 8 from reading, yet I was not familiar with their meaning. I would try to guess the gist of an unfamiliar word from the context around the word, rather than put the book down and look up a dictionary. Admittedly, that was in the days before smart phones.
My apologies to our North American compatriots. The result of my upbringing and education in Australia is to favour UK spelling, meaning, dictionaries (including for Word and other programs) etc, over Merriam Webster etc. Having stated that, the pervasiveness of US TV, movie and culture more broadly means that the younger generations in Australia tend to use both UK & US interchangeably. That’s not a criticism - culture and language is constantly evolving.
Lastly, to extend on Peter Croft’s comment, I find that I think in short-cut terms, almost a short-hand. When I’m writing something down quickly, it’s Mike’s ‘casualness’, but taken a tad further. I sometimes have to re-write an email or chat message to translate from Ross-mental-shorthand into plain English.
Maybe Twitter (guessing, as I don’t use it) and other chatting apps tend to encourage this - I see it all the time at work where the kids use Slack. And kids to me are pretty much anyone under 30 nowadays :~)

[C.R. Marshall]

In my youth, before the internet, I always read with a dictionary by my side. I would often get lost in the dictionary, looking up one word after another when I was curious about a word used in a definition. This served me well through a Bachelors, two Masters and a Ph.D. (My wife teaches English at the same university where I teach in the business school, and often pokes fun at my punctuation errors.).

Now, in my late 60's, most of the fiction and much of the non-fiction that I consume is in the form of audio books. This is less conducive to dictionary diving.

[Adam R]

Re: Speciousness - It's depressing that Stephen Colbert's Truthiness has basically become the lingua franca of a good portion of media, and even more on social media

[Richard Parkin]

I love it when people correct your grammar. The smart money says you’re smarting from some of the half-smart comments of the smart alecks and smarty-pants :).

[Bear.]

English grammar; now that's an oxymoron. But for anyone interested, I recommend the 2nd edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers, OUP. I have a 1978 reprint. To give just a taste, one of my favourite entries is a multiple page discussion concerning the split infinitive. It commences, "[t]he English-speaking world may be divided into (1) those who neither know more care what a split infinitive is; (2) those who do not know, but care very much; (3) those who know and condemn; (4) those who know and approve; and (5) those who know and distinguish. ... 1. Those who neither know nor care are the vast majority, and are a happy folk to be envied by most of the minority classes...". And so it goes; just lovely writing and IMHO how all debate about matters of style (ultimately matters of personal taste about which no single correct answer exists) should be conducted; viz., pleasantly, politely and with class.

[Dave]

Mike,

(Sorry I missed The Best Way to Get Smart and am only now commenting.)

Thanks for such an interesting post and for the link to the Vocabulary Resource page. That site looks quite useful.

If the lessons are as enjoyable as reading a good book, then it will be a valuable tool for building a better vocabulary.

I remember reading an article by William F. Buckley, Jr long ago. He once bet the top editor of Time(?) magazine that an issue of his magazine had fewer "difficult words" than one of Time Magazine's issues. (Wm. Frank knew a few people in the publishing business, as you know.)

It turned out that a Time Magazine issue indeed had more "difficult words" than one of National Review. (Buckley wouldn't have made the bet otherwise.)

Buckley's "problem" was that his "difficult words" weren't easily guessed by context. Thus, people would commonly read his magazine with a dictionary by their side.

Another story from the back page of PC Computing, probably from the early '90s:

Penn Jillette (of Penn and Teller) wrote an article about using an unfamiliar word after antagonizing someone to the point of cursing.

Two or three months later, a reader's letter appeared in which he had tried that on no other than newsman Edwin Newman. The man annoyed Mr. Newman so much that Newman called him an A.H. The man said, "Metonymy, right Ed?" Newman paused a second and replied, "No, synecdoche!" The man slunk away to the laughter of those surrounding Edwin Newman.

Those "old time" news people had pretty good vocabularies.

[RayC]

I agree that having a great vocabulary is a wonderful and enriching (not necessarily $$ enriching). However for the stubborn among us having someone tell you that you "should study x" is easily translated to "x is boring and I won't like studying that." Two family examples: my son couldn't understand the value in reading at a young age. "You read to me, my sister reads to me." Then Calvin and Hobbes hit his purview and I said I wouldn't read it to him. His sister said "and I won't read the next Harry Potter to you." Now he has a vast vocabulary and also loves to read!

The second vocabulary story was with my daughter who was taking Spanish in high school and found it kind of boring. She bought the Spanish language version of Harry Potter (there might be an underlying theme here) figuring she loved that and would learn more that way. A love of reading can enrich your vocabulary in any language.