Tag Archives: context clues

OK, last but not least on this blessedly cool late-July morning, here is a context clues worksheet on the verb cajole. It means “to persuade with flattery or gentle urging especially in the face of reluctance,” “coax,” “to obtain from someone by gentle persuasion,” and “to deceive with soothing words or false promises.”

This isn’t, I will stipulate, a high-frequency word in English. It is, however, a useful one. This verb is only used transitively, do don’t forget your direct object: The teacher cajoled his students into reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

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.

Lately, I have been working slowly on a notebook full of Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Day that I compiled during the COVID quarantine. In general, most of these aren’t high frequency words in English, so I feel little pressure to work on them. Over time, I will complete them all and you will find them here.

One of the words that popped up as I paged through my notebook was the verb abide. It presents with moderately challenging polysemy; it means slightly different things in its intransitive and transitive forms. So, here is a worksheet on the verb abide used intranstively, and another as it is used transitively. To break this down (and you can find more under the first hyperlink in this paragraph), abide used intransitively (i.e. with no direct object) means “to remain stable or fixed in a state” and “to continue in a place.” To put this another way, as The Stranger (played by Sam Elliot) says, in The Big Lebowski, “The Dude abides.” As a transitive verb (direct object required), abide means “to wait for,” “await,” “to endure without yielding,” “withstand,” “to bear patiently,” “tolerate,” and “to accept without objection.” The worksheet is keyed principally to the first two meanings, particularly “to bear patiently.” Camilla abides her dentist’s office waiting room.

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.

OK, last but not least on another oppressively humid day in Central Brooklyn, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun volition. It means “an act of making a choice or decision,” “a choice or decision made,”  “the power of choosing or determining,” and “will.” This document is primarily keyed to the first definition, but with the right kind of Socratic questioning, students should be able to get to the second and possibly the third definition 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.

It was the Word of the Day yesterday at Merriam-Webster, so here is a context clues worksheet on the noun bon vivant. It means “a sociable person who has cultivated and refined tastes especially with respect to food and drink.”

I’d given myself a semi-firm promise that I wouldn’t indiscriminately prepare these documents every time a flashy word came over the transom–or in this case the Merriam-Webster app on my phone. But I cannot resist Gallicisms, so here you are. Besides, I think educated people use bon vivant on the right occasion. So shouldn’t our students be able to work with this useful and euphonious noun?

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.

This context clues worksheet on the verb wangle, I think, came into being when this intransitive and transitive verb surfaced as the Word of the Day on Merriam-Webster, most likely during the pandemic. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard this word used without an invitation following it. In any case, used intransitively, wangle means “to resort to trickery or devious methods.” Transitively, and this is where your direct object, the commonly used an invitation comes into play, wangle means “to adjust or manipulate for personal or fraudulent ends,”  to make or get by devious means, and finagle.

I’m hard pressed to defend this as necessary word in the high school vocabulary. It has an onomatopoeic quality that probably, when wangle is used with an invitation, will provide sufficient context for students to pick it up passively–especially since the word will most likely be used in a conversation about a social event. Finally, to as I prepared this this post, I couldn’t help but thing once again about Joseph Mitchell’s warning about “tinsel words.”

But what do you think?

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.

Here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective furtive.  It means, variously, “done by stealth,” “surreptitious,” “expressive of stealth,” “sly,” “obtained underhandedly,” and “stolen.” The adjective is furtively and the noun is furtiveness. This is a relatively high-frequency word in English and one, I would argue, students really ought to know before they graduate high school.

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.