Tag Archives: term of art

Term of Art: Pronominal Possessive

Posted on October 8, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Pronominal Possessive: Possessive pronoun such as hers, its, and theirs.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Term of Art: Risk Aversion

Posted on October 6, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Risk aversion: A widespread characteristic of human preferences, first discussed in 1738 by the Swiss mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli (1700-82), according to which most people tend to value gains involving risk less that certain gains of equivalent monetary expectation. A typical example is a choice between a sure gain of 50 units (Swiss francs, dollars, pounds sterling, or any other units) and a gamble involving a 50 percent probability of winning 100 units and a 50 percent probability of winning nothing. The two prospects are of equivalent monetary expected value, but most people prefer the sure gain to the gamble, which they typically value equally to a sure gain of about 35 units.”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Term of Art: Principal Verb

Posted on October 6, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Principal Verb: The predicating verb in a main clause or sentence.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Term of Art: Prepositional Phrase

Posted on October 5, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Prepositional Phrase: A group of words consisting of a preposition, its object, and any of the object’s modifiers. Georgia on my mind.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Term of Art: War of Attrition

Posted on October 5, 2020 | Leave a comment

“War of Attrition Situation in which, as on the Western Front in World War I, both sides appear equally balanced, are unable to conduct a war of movement, and are restricted to wearing the enemy down militarily, industrially, and psychologically.”

Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.

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Term of Art: Preposition

Posted on October 2, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Preposition: A word that relates its object (a noun, pronoun, or -ing verb form) to another word in the sentence. She is the leader of our group. We opened the door by picking the lock. She went out the window.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Metacognition (n)

Posted on October 2, 2020 | Leave a comment

It’s something I try to work into my units and lessons, and the evidence for its necessity in the classroom is widespread and incontrovertible, so I have used heavily, across the common branch curriculum, this context clues worksheet on the noun metacognition.

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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Term of Art: Predicate

Posted on September 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Predicate: The verb and its related words in a clause or sentence. The predicate expresses what the subject does, experiences, or is. Birds fly. The partygoers celebrated wildly for a long time.”

Excerpted from: Strunk, William Jr., and E.B. White. The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition. New York: Longman, 2000.

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Term of Art: Antonomasia

Posted on September 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

“Antonomasia: [Stress: ‘an-to-no-May-zy-a’]. 1. In rhetoric, the use of an epithet to acknowledge a quality in one person or place by using the name of another person or place already known for that quality: Henry is the local Casanova; Cambridge is England’s Silicon Valley. 2. The use of an epithet instead of the name of a person or thing: the Swan of Avon William Shakespeare.”

Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

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Historical Term: Billeting

Posted on September 28, 2020 | Leave a comment

[Given the post immediately below this on, it’s worth mentioning that the Third Amendment to the United States Constitution–i.e. the third of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights, guaranteed this freedom: “No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”]

“Billeting The custom of requiring householders to provide accommodation for members of the armed forces. The system was widely abused in the 17th century under Charles I and protests against it were included in the Petition of Right (1628). Despite the forbidding of forced billeting in 1679, it continued under Charles II and James II, ending only when parliament agreed to the building of permanent barracks in 1792.”

Excerpted from: Cook, Chris. Dictionary of Historical Terms. New York: Gramercy, 1998.

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