In elementary school, my teacher assigned us to read books at home and write down all the words we didn’t know. This was one of our main methods for studying vocabulary, and it continued through middle school, gradually dying out in high school English.
That was probably the apogee of my vocabulary development. There are no classes in college where you learn English vocabulary (except for domain-specific jargon). I guess the idea is that you’re supposed to already have a fully fleshed-out vocabulary by the time you get to college. And if you see a word you don’t know, you look it up yourself. Or, more realistically, you just skip it, and if anyone asks, you knew that word all along.
I just finished reading the novel Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which was full of insightful and evocative prose, and discovered that one of the joys of reading books written for adults is exploring the outermost nooks and crannies of your language, the ones that you don’t usually reach when you’re dusting unless you’re a particularly skilled—or ostentatious—writer (Mantel, fortunately, is the former). In honor of doing this in elementary school when it was a lot harder, here are 14 words I came across this past month that I didn’t skip over, for once:
Parochial: having a limited or narrow outlook or scope.
Venality: the quality of being open to bribery or overly motivated by money.
Inchoate: just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.
Intransigent: unwilling or refusing to change one’s views or to agree about something.
Supine: lying face upward; failing to act or protest as a result of moral weakness or indolence.
Intractable: hard to control or deal with.
Truculent: eager or quick to argue or fight; aggressively defiant.
Recondite: little known; abstruse.
Opprobrious: expressing scorn or criticism.
Syncretic: characterized or brought about by a combination of different forms of belief or practice.
Compunction: a feeling of guilt or moral scruple that prevents or follows the doing of something bad.
Equanimity: mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, especially in a difficult situation.
Rapacity: aggressive greed.
Susurration: whispering, murmuring, or rustling.
Used in a sentence: “The intransigently venal guard, in his truculent rapacity, felt no compunctions over his opprobrious remark to the intractable monk of some recondite syncretic order who, lacking equanimity, responded to the guard’s parochial and barely inchoate criticisms by falling supine and mimicking the susurration of the river.”
My friend Camryn: “That was incomprehensible. There’s a word for you.” ∎