“Mural: A large painting or decoration applied directly on a wall surface or completed separately and later affixed to it. Early Italian Renaissance examples include church frescoes, while in this century Expressionist and Social Realist murals have been commissioned for public buildings in postrevolutionary Mexico.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Discursive (adjective): Covering a range of topics or discoursing freely and broadly, moving from subject to subject; characterized by rational analysis rather than intuition. Adverb: discursively; noun: discursiveness.
‘He published some of the best reporting—of an unofficial and personal kind—that was written about the war, and he elicited from Augustus John his delightful discursive memoirs, in which history is unimportant and chronology does not exist.’ Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Depot for Station. ‘Railroad depot.’ A depot is a place of deposit; as, a depot of supply for an army.”
Excerpted from: Bierce, Ambrose. Write it Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010.
“Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: (April 19-May 16, 1943) Revolt by Polish Jews under Nazi occupation against deportation to Treblinka. By July 1942 the Nazis had herded 500,000 Jews from surrounding areas into the ghetto in Warsaw. Though starvation killed thousands each month, the Nazis began transferring over 5,000 Jews a week to rural ‘labor camps.’ When word reached the ghetto in early 1943 that the destination was actually the gas chambers at Treblinka, the underground Jewish combat group ZOB attacked the Nazis, killing 50 in four days of street fighting and causing the deportations to halt. On April 19, Heinrich Himmler sent 2,000 SS men and army troops to clear the ghetto of its remaining 56,000 Jews. For four weeks the Jewish ZOB and guerillas fought with pistols and homemade bombs, destroying tanks and killing several hundred Nazis, until their ammunition ran out. All the Jews were either killed or deported, and on May 16 the SS chief declared ‘The Warsaw Ghetto is no more.’”
Excerpted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000
Posted in Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“self-correction: A student’s ability to detect and correct errors. The term is often used while students read aloud and hear themselves make errors but correct it. Some reading tests consider a self-correction to be an error, which can result in a misleading oral reading score.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Diatribe (noun): And abusive, often prolonged attack or denunciation; acrimonious harangue or critique.
‘Without polemic, dialectic, or diatribe, she has conveyed more clearly than anyone I’ve ever read before what it was like to be a girl in the 50’s, when one had a chance to grow up quietly and gradually.’ Susan Bolotin, The New York Times”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
“Mosan: Term referring to art produced in the 12th and early 13th centuries in the valley of the Meuse River, which rises in northeastern France and flows through the Low Countries.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Liberal Arts: In the Middle Ages, the seven branches of learning: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Biblical authority for fixing the number at seven comes from Proverbs 9:1: “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” Such applied subjects as law and medicine were excluded from the from the liberal arts on the grounds that they were concerned with purely practical matters. In modern times, the liberal arts include languages, sciences, philosophy, history, and related subjects. The term is a translation of the Latin artes liberales, so called because their pursuit was the privilege of freemen who were called liberi.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Many humanities teachers feel that they are fighting for a lost cause. They believe that the proliferation of electronic media will eventually make them obsolete. They see the time their students spend with TV and movies and on the Internet and feel what they have to offer–words, mere words–must look shabby by comparison.
Not so. When human beings try to come to terms with who they are and describe who they hope to be, the most effective medium is words. Through words we represent ourselves to ourselves; we fix our awareness of who we are and what we are. Then we can step back and gain distance on what we’ve said. With perspective comes the possibility for change. People write about their lives in their journals; talk things over with friends; talk, at day’s end, to themselves about what has come to pass. And then they can brood on what they’ve said, privately or with another. From that brooding comes the possibility of new beginnings. In this process, words allow for precision and nuance that images and music generally don’t permit.”
Excerpted from: Edmundson, Mark. Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
This week’s Text is a word-builder from the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins. My understanding of linguistics is amateurish at best. Nonetheless, I would assess this document as of mid-level linguistic work, so it might not be appropriate for classroom use. It might be broken into pieces for teaching the inventory of prefixes and suffixes this document contains. Or, it might be handy to keep on one’s desk to keep all of this straight in one’s mind.
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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