“Ad Infinitum To infinity: without limit, endlessly or ceaselessly; forever.
‘Administrators expedited, finalized, implemented, processed ad infinitum, while social workers, already famed for euphemism, called their investigators case workers….’ Mary Dohan, Our Own Words.”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
It’s Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day today, so here is a context clues worksheet on the noun palaver. It means, variously, “a long parley usually between persons of different cultures or levels of sophistication,” “idle talk,” and “misleading or beguiling speech.” The context in this worksheet calls for the latter two meanings.
I know this isn’t the most commonly used word in the English language, but I think it might make a reasonable surrogate for a commonly used epithet among many of the students I have served, to wit, bulls**t (please forgive me that vulgarism, even in its elided form, on this G-rated blog).
Incidentally, this word can also be used as a verb to mean, intransitively, “to talk profusely or idly,” “parley,” and transitively to mean “to use palaver to cajole.” The word has an interesting pedigree: it arrives in English from the Latin parabola (“parable,” “speech”) via the Portuguese palavra (“word,” “speech”).
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.
OK, last but not least on this summer afternoon, here is a worksheet on the Greek word root apo–. It means away, from, off, and separate.
I don’t know if I’ve ever used this document in the classroom, which isn’t surprising, since I have hundreds of these worksheets. I tend to use the most productive roots, with words that students must use to navigate the secondary common branch curricula, in my weekly instructional period dedicated to word roots and vocabulary. Still, you’ll find this root at the basis of apogee, apology, apostle, and apostrophe among other relatively high frequency words in English, so it might be worth asking students to take a look at it. I think I would be inclined to modify it into a shorter, simpler pattern recognition exercise. Because this is a Microsoft Word document, you too can manipulate it to your purposes.
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 week’s Text is a lesson plan on the Greek word root neo–. As you most likely know, it means, simply, new. It can also mean recent, a slightly different temporal shade of meaning from new. This is a very productive root in English; it can be set as a prefix across a wide variety of nouns and adjectives.
I start this unit, to hint at were it’s going, with this context clues worksheet on the verb innovate (nov is the Latin equivalent of neo). You’ll need this scaffolded worksheet on neo to execute this lesson.
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.
Here is a worksheet on the Greek word root blasto/o. It means “cell, cell layer, immature cell, and “primitive bud.”
As you will see when you read the words under review, this isn’t a root that produces a lot of high-frequency words in English. But these words, if the the book from which the text for this document is drawn can be trusted, these words do turn up on the SAT. And if you have students planning careers in the health care professions? This is definitely a word root they should know.
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 Cultural Literacy worksheet on the noun cause celebre. It means, as I am sure you know, “a legal case that excites widespread interest” and “a notorious person, thing, incident, or episode.”
This Gallicism isn’t exactly the most commonly used word in the the language, but educated people do use it. I’ll hazard a guess that one wouldn’t have far to look in major metropolitan newspapers or literary magazines like The Atlantic, Harpers, or The New Yorker to see this word in action. If nothing else, when children and adolescents make foolish choices, as the often do, this is the right word to describe them, especially in its latter sense.
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 worksheet on the Latin word roots voc and vok. They mean, as you might see or hear, “to call,” “voice.” This is a very productive root in English which you’ll find these roots at the base of words like vocal, advocate, invoke, and, of course, vocabulary. In other words, some high-frequency and relatively high-frequency words in English.
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.
Last but not least today, here is a context clues worksheet on the adjective louche. You no doubt see and hear that this word–which means “not reputable or decent”–is a loan word from French. This is known as Franglais; because of English’s debt to French, there are a lot of French words in the English language.
In any case, louche is obviously not a word students will use often, and perhaps they don’t need to know it. But if you are, say, the advisor for your high school’s newspaper? If I were in your position I would want budding journalists to know this word. It is well applied to people to fancy themselves as important, then, well, disappoint when their louche conduct is exposed. I’m talking about people like Harvey Weinstein or Cardinal Bernard Francis Law.
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 worksheet on the Greek word root bio. It means, simply, life.
There is no need to belabor the productivity of this root–it forms the basis of a lot of basic words in English: biography, biology, and biodegradable, to name just three.
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.
“-Onym: [Through Latin from Greek onuma/onoma name]. A word base or combining form that stands either for a word (as in synonym) or a name (as in pseudonym). Words containing -onym have two kinds of adjective: with –ous as in synonymous (having the nature or quality of a synonym: synonymous words) or with –ic, as in synonymic (concerning synonyms: synonymic relationships). The form –onymy indicates type, as with synonymy (the type sense relation in which words have the same or similar meaning) and eponymy (the category of word-formation that concerns words derived with people’s names). Because –onym begins with o (the commonest Greek thematic vowel, as in biography), the base form is sometimes taken to be -nym, an assumption reinforced by the initial n of the equivalent terms nomen in Latin and name in English. As a result, some recent technical terms have been formed on –nym: for example, characternym and paranym. See acronym, antonym, eponym, heteronym, homonym, hyponym, retronym.”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
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