Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

This week’s Text is a lesson on the Latin word root sept. Unlike many of the other lessons on word roots this blog published, sept is not at the root of a lot of high frequency words–except for September, of course. So the scaffolded worksheet that is the principle work of this lesson contains a lot of seldom-used words such as septet (unless of course you are a Wynton Marsalis fan surprised by his disbanding of his estimable septet), septillion, septuagint, and septuble, and includes a list of cognates from the Romance languages.

This do-now exercise on the adjective and adverb weekly doesn’t quite point the way toward the meaning of sept as I would have hoped it would. A week has seven days, of course, but weekly means as an adverb “every week,” “once a week,” and “by the week”; as an adjective, it means “occurring, appearing, or done weekly.” So nothing denoting or connoting seven, alas.

So this lesson leaves something to be desired in terms of coherence and priorities (i.e. is this the best word root to teach? Is there a root more productive of high-frequency English words that would be more useful to students?). But what do you think?

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.