Vocabulary Lessons

My favorite elementary-school teacher was my fifth-grade teacher, who had a wonderful way of teaching her pupils the meaning of new words.  Each student kept in the storage compartment beneath their seat a dictionary (provided by the school, or the student could bring their own).  During reading-time, as one pupil read aloud from a book and others read along, the teacher would interrupt whenever we came to a word she thought might be unfamiliar to us. "What does that word mean?" she asked. "Look it up!"  At her command, we'd all grab our dictionaries from beneath our seats and race to find the word.  The first pupil to find it was rewarded by getting to read the dictionary's definition aloud.

That pattern of accumulating knowledge of more and more words continued during my education in middle school, high school, and college.  Knowing the meaning of words that were employed almost exclusively in college became a mark of a person's academic standing.

However, once I left the college campus, I had to learn a new type of vocabulary lesson -- how to shed words rather than accumulate more of them.  When conversing with people outside collegiate circles, using an esoteric word could hinder rather than enable communication.  And in preparing my own lectures to people of diverse backgrounds and education, I discovered that I could usually use a familiar synonym or a simple phrase instead of a technical word that only a few might know.  Besides my wanting to communicate clearly through my lectures, I did not want anyone in the class who did not know the meaning of a technical word to feel inferior to the rest of the class.

As years have gone by, and as I have observed more about the use of words and phrases in the English language, I have noticed another type of shedding of words.  Namely, the avoidance of words or phrases that were based on a disparagement of a particular group of people.  The most obvious example in the U.S. today is the use of the phrase "the 'n' word" instead of the slur it is referring to.  A less obvious example is that I virtually never hear the phrase "Indian giver" anymore.

Other abandoning of phrases are less known.  Have you ever noticed that preceding the title page in most books is a page that bears only the book's title (no subtitle or author)?  Few people today know that page was once called the "bastard title page," that term growing out of a condescending attitude that "bastards" supposedly had only half the parentage other people had.  Fortunately, publishers today have come to refer to that page of a book simply as the "half-title page."

Interestingly, some of the reconsideration of word usages crisscross our attitudes toward the non-human world of Nature.  People knowing only English might not know that the word "mulatto" for someone of half Caucasian and half Negro ancestry is to Spanish-speaking ears calling that person a "mule."  But why should those hard-working animals also be disparaged by implication because their strength has come from both donkeys and horses?

I myself would like to find a compact substitute for the expression "kill two birds with one stone."  I do recognize that some people living at a subsistence level have to depend upon killing wild birds for animal protein.  Nevertheless, in industrialized countries today, depleted bird populations demand that we cultivate an appreciation of keeping birds alive.  Although "kill two birds with one stone" is a familiar, casual expression, I do not want to be casual in my attitude toward birds.

Countless parents have told their kids, "Watch your language!"  Watching how the English vocabulary has shifted from when I was in the fifth grade to the present, I can discern two things about human nature:  An eagerness to learn (á la those fifth-grade students). And also an ability to become more considerate.

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Can you discern any improvements in cultural attitudes during your lifetime, either toward humans or toward Nature?