AVReading Newsletter October: Vocabulary Collapse
I have found this year’s class of ninth graders to be beguiling, a term that expresses my intrigue and amusement around their collective personality and demeanor. Of course, beguiling is not a word we typically use in our daily vocabulary, and in all fairness, it really hasn’t been widely used in books since the early 19th century (according to Google’s Ngram Viewer). Not sure I would typically use it in front of a class, either. Nonetheless, it’s a fun word. It works better than other words like interesting, fun, or entertaining. There is perhaps a sense of magic to the word, as if you are being enchanted. I make this point to highlight the growing concern related to our collective shrinking vocabulary, a thesis that one of my orators is exploring this year. Here are some of the things she has found. First, we are using fewer words th...