Thursday, January 26, 2012

The playground of words

The playground of words is humor. I don't discourage my children from Monty Python, George Carlin, Weird Al Yankovic, and other linguistic athletes of that ilk. Laughter and commentary about people doing circus tricks with words is a world above and beyond vocabulary lists.



I do recall, though, my friends and I made even vocabulary lists fun when I was in school by trying to put all the words in one or two sentences, or by using the words as words, like "The word 'obfuscate' is rarely used," or "'Discrete' is a homonym of 'discreet'," without any hint we knew how to use the words in context (which we usually did).

Words, Words, Words
photo by Sandra Dodd
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1 comment:

  1. I actually got paid for doing vocabulary lists for a while. I worked for a bilingual dictionary publisher, and my job mainly consisted of inventing sentences for every word in the dictionary so that translators could check that their proposed translations actually worked in different contexts. I lasted a couple of years, but had to bail out when I saw "annular" coming round for the third time!

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