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Megan Branch, Intern

The Oxford Dictionary of Education edited by Susan Wallace, covers educational terms and concepts from the UK, the US, South Africa, Australia and Canada. Some of the words, like “Big Brother Syndrome” are unique to the 21st century while others—“regius professor”—have been around for hundreds of years. The Dictionary is UK-focused, so I thought it would be interesting to look at some terms that we don’t hear very often in the US. Below, I’ve excerpted some of the words from the “A”, “B”, “C” and “R”, “S”, “T” sections.

Active vocabulary: The range of words which an individual is able to use accurately in their speech (active spoken vocabulary), or their writing (active written vocabulary), or both of these. The active vocabulary does not include words which are only recognized and understood, either by reading or hearing, but not actually used. At most stages of learning of a language, the learner’s active vocabulary will be more limited than their comprehension. In other words, their understanding will outstrip their ability to express themselves.

Big Brother Syndrome: A growing tendency among younger learners to voice an ambition for celebrity without notable achievement. Derived from a reality television programme of the same name, the term is now in widespread use by teachers and other professionals involved in work with young people. It expresses a concern not only about values, but also about the difficulties of motivating learners toward academic achievement or useful qualifications which learners themselves may dismiss as irrelevant to their goal of being thrust into a celebrity lifestyle, since their Big Brother role models often make a virtue of having achieved fame despite having little or no academic success at school.

Controlled schools: A specific kind of school in Northern Ireland, owned and funded by the *Education and Library Boards. Boards of governors are now taking more control. These are mainly Protestant schools and the Church is represented on the board of governors.

Regius professor:*Professorships (or chairs) at the *universities of Oxford and Cambridge and some Scottish universities, which were funded, or endowed, by the Crown and for which the Crown retains the right to nominate appointees. In practice, candidates are chosen on the advice of senior government ministers. The first such chair to be founded was that of Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford University in the 15th century.

Summative assessment: *Assessment which takes place at the end of a course of study and provides the final judgment on, or ‘sums up,’ the candidate’s performance. The most common form of summative assessment is the end examination.

Tripos: A course of study leading to an *honours degree at Cambridge University, where the student is required to pass two tripos examinations in order to be awarded their *Bachelor of Arts. The name refers to the three-legged stool on which, in medieval times, graduates sat to deliver a satirical speech at their degree ceremony.

By Ashley Bray, Intern Extraordinaire

Few people can get excited over thesauruses like writers can, and as a writer and student myself, I eagerly sat down to take a look at the new Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. I was immediately drawn to the Word Notes, which are comments from contributing authors about word entries. I love these notes because they bring you inside the heads of authors to show you just what they are thinking about certain words— a privilege a budding writer almost never gets! I looked up a bunch of notes by David Foster Wallace in light of his recent death, and I wanted to share my favorites.

One of the more interesting notes I came across was for pulchritude, which is a synonym for beauty. Wallace points out that this word is anything but beautiful:

“A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.”

Well, Wallace is right about the ugliness of pulchritude. Words like putrid and sepulcher come to mind before beauty ever does. Wallace also points out a very interesting activity that I think appeals to word-lovers just as much as “school-age kids.” I decided to take his suggestion in a different direction and started to make a list of words that do correlate with their meaning. Here’s what I came up with:

• Bedraggled
• Labyrinthine
• Bubble
• Prickly
• Stuck
• Pierce

What words can you think of that are either paradoxical or parallel to their meanings?

Wallace also wrote an awesome entry for hairy. Here’s another word game for you— how many different ways can you think of to say the word hairy?

You’d be surprised at the answer. Wallace writes about 22 different ways (and two additional classifications) to say the word hairy. I won’t list them all here, but I’ll give you a taste of some of the most “hair-raising” (excuse the pun):

• Glabrous: “the loveliest of all hair-related adjectives, means having no hair (on a given part) at all. Please note that glabrous means more baby’s-bottom-hairless than bald or shaved, though if you wanted to describe a bald person in an ironically fancy way you could talk about his glabrous dome or something.” Quite frankly, after that description how could you not want to find a way to use glabrous in your writing?
• Tomentose: “means ‘covered with dense little matted hairs’— baby chimps, hobbits’ feet, and Robin Williams are all tomentose.” Need I comment further on this gem?
• Crinite: “means ‘hairy or possessed of a hair-like appendage,’ though its mainly a botanical term and would be a bit eccentric applied to a person.” I don’t care if it’s eccentric— I smell a story centering on a person with a “hair-like appendage.”

Come on fellow writers, any takers?

An important blog anniversary thought, made with http://diy.despair.com/motivator.php.
(The photo is by Holly, taken at the Hay Festival.)

And I don't think I ever linked to This Nemi Cartoon, from Metro, and I should have done.

And now I'll do the post that contains The Birthday Thing.