Mr. Glidden's Vocabulary Words
I was a decidedly indifferent student in both temperament and result through all phases of my academic career. Taking little advantage of what I was offered and full advantage of my capacity to make it appear I was using whatever insignificant brain power had been bestowed upon me.
I attended private school from 7th through 12th grade. Most of my fellow students were both far more gifted intellectually and academically motivated, a combination that left me in the continual position of eating dust.
Now, six decades later, they often laugh at jokes about some aspect of our education that fully escapes my grasp. Like Mr. Glidden 's vocabulary words.
When we were in 7th grade, we had a teacher who wanted, no demanded, that we enhance our use of the English language. He gave us hundreds of bizarre, remote and often hilarious words whose definition we were to capture. Most never to find the light of day in conversation, pithy, polite or otherwise, from the day we first read them until our final breath. But that was decidedly not the point of this exercise.
Just yesterday, one of my classmates began an email chain with the full range of Mr. Glidden’s pearls. The responses included "Fun as a zarf", two references to "xyster", as well as one to "strigli".
If I ever knew what any of those terms meant, they abandoned the confines of my mind well more than a half century past. How do so many remain embedded in others?
The list, in handwritten form, has just been forwarded by one of my classmates. Who holds onto this for six decades? The only thing I retain from those days are my baseball cards.
Anyway, here are but a few samples from just the first of the eight pages provided: lustrum, duniwassel. incunabulum, sporran, snouter.
I feel a little dumber as I turn each page, knowing that some among the email chain could likely still score 100 on this exam.
I search for a word among these that can best define my relationship to this undertaking. Omphaloskepsis might work. It is (apparently) the act of contemplating one's navel while meditating.
Which kind of neatly sums up my academic career.
Thanks for the word list.