“Yankee, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States, the word is unknown. (See DAMYANK.)”
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
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
It’s a word used routinely in relation to the American Civil War in social studies textbooks, but in my experience never taught explicitly in social studies classrooms, so maybe this Cultural Literacy worksheet on the adjective antebellum. This Latinism, as this half-page worksheet points out in its two-sentence reading (with two comprehension questions), means “before the war.”
If you think it will help, here is a word root exercise on the Latin root bell-.
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.
“Lintel: Horizontal architectural member which spans an opening.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
Starting out this already warm Wednesday morning, here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective effusive. This is a useful, but to my ear little-used, word, which is too bad. It means, especially for the purposes of the context clues on this worksheet, “marked by the expression of great or excessive emotion or enthusiasm.”
Maybe people just don’t effuse anymore. And that is too bad as well.
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.
“The fortune or our lives therefore depends on employing well the short period of our youth.”
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to his daughter, Martha (1787)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Last but quite possibly least this morning, here is a on the verb phrase feel like as used with a gerund. I don’t feel like discussing why I remain skeptical of the value of this series of worksheets.
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.
“Venus de Medici: A statue thought to date from the 4th century BC. It was dug up in the 17th century in the villa of Hadrian at Tivoli, near Rome, in eleven pieces. It was kept in the Medici Palace at Rome until its removal to Florence by Cosimo III de’Medici (1642-1723). Since 1860 it has been in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Byron described his reaction to the statue in Childe Harold:
‘We gaze and turn away, and know not where,
Dazzled and drunk with Beauty, till the heart
Reels with its fullness…’
Lord Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, IV (1818)
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Here is a reading on hypnosis along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I believe this might be high-interest material, so I have tagged it as such.
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.
“One of the cornerstones of human life is that there are twelve months in a year. Recent archaeological discoveries suggest that we have been notching off the days of the cycle of the moon for hundreds of thousands of years, using stone tools to mark bone. And it must have been one of our first pieces of inherited science that the counting off of twelve moons fitted magically into the annual miracle of the changing seasons. As there are (very nearly) thirty days in each lunar month, one of the very first joys of multiplication must have been that when multiplying these twelve months by thirty, you create 360, which is (roughly) how many days there are in the year. So we have always divided up the heavens—and any circles we come across—into 360 degrees.
The added harmony of the tides, and the female cycle of fertility fitting into the lunar months, provided further proof that there was a pattern and an order to the world. And one of those patterns was very clearly that twelve moons make one year. This innate power of twelve was further reinforced when the heavens, through which the sun was imagined to process, were also neatly divided into twelve segments. Each of the twelve signs of the Zodiac were allotted 30 degrees of the Heavenly circle very early on in mankind’s construction of an ordered world. This would later be reinforced by other twelvefold divisions, aspiring to create the same graceful, ordered inevitability.
These twelvefold divisions of the night sky and the moon also made for very easy organization. A clan or a district could become associated with a particular month, and so, whether it was taking turns to guard a citadel, provide food for a shrine or furnish a choir for the temple at the next full moon, it became almost a natural habit of mankind to form themselves into twelve.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Moving right along this morning, here is a worksheet on the Latin word root tri. Do I need to tell you that it means three, and is found (as it is in this document) in such high-frequency words in English as triangle, triathlon, and triad?
I didn’t think so.
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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