“Bear, n. In the stock market, a broker who, having sold short, uses his customers’ stocks to break the price.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. David E. Schultz and S.J. Joshi, eds. The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2000.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on bonds, the financial instrument, not the force that holds atoms and molecules together, nor the ineffable thing that grows between friends, lovers, and humans and their pets.
I worked for ten years in a economics-and-finance-themed high school in Manhattan’s financial district. The word bond, which is extravagantly polysemous, really confounded the students I served there. Over the years, I developed a range of materials to teach this word in all its meanings in all the parts of speech. So, be on the lookout for those documents on this blog.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Build for Make. ‘Build a fire.’ ‘Build a canal.’ Even ‘build a tunnel’ is not unknown, and probably if the woodchuck is skilled in the American tongue he speaks of building a hole.’”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun etiquette. You can see its French lineage. It means “the conduct or procedure required by good breeding or prescribed by authority to be observed in social or official life.”
Sheesh. I’m kind of surprised to see the locution “good breeding” used in connection with anything but race horses anymore. Also, is is just me, or does this word possess an onomatopoeic quality? I’ve always thought it was a dainty word that characterized, well, dainty behavior.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? A play (1962) by the US playwright Edward Albee (1928-2016) depicting the tense relationship between a sharp-tongued college professor and his embittered wife. Filmed in 1966 with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in the two main roles, the play owed its memorable title to a line of graffiti scribbled in soap on a mirror in a bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village that the author happened visit in the 1950s. The quip, evidently derived from the song title ‘Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf’ from the Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs (1933), was later redefined by Albee as meaning ‘who’s afraid of living without false illusions.’”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Here is a learning support on using colons and semicolons in compound sentences. Like a number of these published on this blog recently, this is from Paul Brians’ fine book Common Errors in English Usage.
This passage is a little more than half of the page. There is plenty of room to add supported examples, structured exercises, or whatever else best suits the needs of your classroom. It’s formatted in Microsoft Word, so it is easily exportable and manipulable.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Prehistoric Art: The art of painting on the walls of caves lasted from the beginning of the Old Stone Age to the end of the New Stone Age, around 3000 B.C. The Paleolithic cave paintings at Altamira (Spain) and those at Lascaux (France) have been dated between 40,000 and 10,000 B.C.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Here is a reading on Native Americans and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet.
This reading is only four paragraphs. It uses the story of the Nez Perce Tribe, and especially Chief Joseph’s legendary speech–“Hear me, my chiefs!” I am tired. My heart is sick. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever”–to tell the story of the destruction of the indigenous civilizations that inhabited North America prior to the arrival of the first European immigrants from England.
Given the disturbing, but unsurprising, discovery of mass graves at Canadian Indian Residential Schools, now is a very good time to take a look at what (if you happen to be of European descent, as I am) our forefathers wrought. It is not a pretty picture. But neither is ignoring these crimes. In any case, I think we are just seeing the first of the remains of this genocide.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“semantics: The study of words and sentences and their meanings. An individual with a weak vocabulary may be considered to have a semantic disorder. An individual with a semantic disorder may understand concepts but have difficulty finding the word to express it. Informal activities such as quizzing verbal opposites, word categorization, and classification tasks can be useful ways in which to assess semantic skills.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
Here is a context clues worksheet on the noun epoch. As I recall, I wrote this because the word kept popping up in a global studies class I co-taught in New York City some years ago. I wanted to make sure students fully understood the meaning of this word.
In any case, it remains in sufficiently common use in English that it is worth teaching for its own sake.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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