devilot76 said:
I studied Latin for 5 years at school
Wonderful language and immensely useful when trying to figure out what words might mean!
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What's The Best Way To Increase You Vocabulary?
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I studied Latin for 5 years at school
Wonderful language and immensely useful when trying to figure out what words might mean!
Just to throw in some more links:
But yeah, reading is a great way to improve the vocabulary, as is staying away from bad resources like MR! Which are full of shorthand and bad grammar
But yeah, reading is a great way to improve the vocabulary, as is staying away from bad resources like MR! Which are full of shorthand and bad grammar
Well, depends whether you actually mean learn Latin itself (which can extremely complicated; I bought Latin for Dummies and I understand some stuff but I've barely scratched the surface), or just the roots, which isn't necessarily too hard. It's cool to know common Latin words and phrases in any case, like "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) and state/military mottoes like "Sic semper tyrannis" (Thus always to tyrants; Virginia state motto). There's also a lot of Latin in medicine and law.devilot76 said:That's a really good suggestion-- learning Latin. Don't know any place around here that offers it though. Sounds like fun.
It's way cool to see a word that you've known for years and suddenly realize its etymology. For example, when I saw in Latin for Dummies that "insula" is Latin for "island" (because, of course, islands are insulated by water), I was like, "Hey, cool, so a peninsula is almost an island" (as "pen" means almost).
pulsewidth947 said:But yeah, reading is a great way to improve the vocabulary, as is staying away from bad resources like MR! Which are full of shorthand and bad grammar
See the link I provided in my earlier post for a discussion on that topic in general.
I think your being too thick, cuz MR is the bestest place to have funs and reads all teh posts on all subjects of interest to us.pulsewidth947 said:reading is a great way to improve the vocabulary, as is staying away from bad resources like MR! Which are full of shorthand and bad grammar
The curiosity is just killing me: Why did you put the word "your" in quotes?Chundles said:
When I was growing up, there was a little restaurant in my home town that had this sign in its window: No bills larger than a "twenty". One of my friends always wondered why the sign's author had decided to put the word "twenty" in quotes; he even wrote a little essay about it for the school newspaper. Ever since, I've been curious about what drives people to do that.
Ah, OK, I'd missed that. I thought it was "just" one of those random drive-by quotings.emw said:Re-read the thread title for a clue...
~Shard~ said:Thanks for the link, I think I just might sign up for fun!
It is a fun service. It's where I learned the word "defenestrate."
Who knew the English language had a word for the act of jumping out a window?
Never thought I'd hear it in actual use until I recently saw a (parody?) Dennis Miller clip. Definitely a 25-cent word.
It really depends on the person. If the person is pretentious, then likely he/she are trying to loft themself above you. If the opposite, then they are doing no more a natural thing than it is for some people to say "y'all". I use my full vocabularly as often as I can, particularly because I am always trying to increase it. Some people ask me to rephrase things, at times, but most people can get the picture just from the surrounding context. My sister is the one who instilled in me a love for my lexicon. She is also the reason I've been studying Latin for the past 6 years now. I'm lovin' it!emw said:
FredAkbar said:
I seem to remember reading in one of my etymology of English books, that island coming from insula was actually a red herring (along the lines of debt not really coming from debitum) and it was actually inherited from a Norse word - igland - in the 10/11C. Insula was also the Roman word for an apartment building...
Of course there's much confusion as to when certain words entered the English language. The experts now appear to have decided that the Romans left very few when they occupied the UK and most of the words with a Latin heritage actually came from the French during the Norman conquest.
One of the reasons that English has such a large number of synonyms (hence the requirement for this thread on expanding the vocabulary) is because with the Celts, Romans, Vikings, Saxons and Normans all occupying Britain for various periods, often coinciding in different areas, different words evolved from each language to mean similar things.
I was talking about increasing the vocabulary of any language you might speak (or rather read, in this case). Reading will help you with any language.Tahko said:
I actually read much more English than Norwegian these days and although my English has improved somewhat my Norwegian vocabulary is actually suffering...
With defenestrate, again, it's cool seeing how languages are often linked together. In this case, it was when I was recently studying French and learned that fenêtre is French for window: it's interesting how we have a word (defenestrate) in English that comes from that root, but we don't have a word like that for window itself (or do we?), like the French do. It's like AppleSpider said, English words have so many different origins because of the language's odd history.
And, while we're on the subject. Norwegian uses 'Vindu', same word as 'Window', obviously, while Swedish (which basically is the same language as Norwegian) uses 'fönster', which I would guess comes from the French, which in it's turn comes from the latin 'fenestra' which also is the base for defenestrate, according to Apple's Dictionary.app...FredAkbar said:
As most people have already said, reading is really the best way to increse your vocabulary. In preperation for the SAT last year, I did absolutely nothing in the vocab department, and I got a 790 verbal score (out of 67 questions I missed 2 questions and omitted one). I read quite a bit, for both school and just because I want to, and I attribute a large part of my score to this. I know you said you don't really read much, but there's got to be something at your local bookstore that interests you.
Somebody mentioned Latin; in Florida we have a virtual school where you can take classes for high school credit online. I decided to take Latin last year, since all my school offers in the language department is Spanish and French, and quite frankly, after 3 years I was tired of Spanish. Unfortunatly, I had to drop the online class after Hurricane Charley came though (no internet for about 3 months and there was no way for me to catch up), but for the few months I took it, it was really cool to see all the connections to English. That said, it is a pretty difficult language, so instead of one of the for Dummies books, get a book of latin roots if you're interested in this method of improving your vocabulary. That way you don't have to learn all the complicated sentence structures and conjugations involved with Latin.
Finally, there are workbooks and such that can help improve your vocab. We had this workbook in my AP Language and Comp class last year called Joy of Vocab, that was actually did improve my vocab. I don't know where you would go about getting a copy though. In my AP Lang class we also had to read a book called 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. This book also helped improve my vocab, and it's not a schoolbook or anything. Link
Somebody mentioned Latin; in Florida we have a virtual school where you can take classes for high school credit online. I decided to take Latin last year, since all my school offers in the language department is Spanish and French, and quite frankly, after 3 years I was tired of Spanish. Unfortunatly, I had to drop the online class after Hurricane Charley came though (no internet for about 3 months and there was no way for me to catch up), but for the few months I took it, it was really cool to see all the connections to English. That said, it is a pretty difficult language, so instead of one of the for Dummies books, get a book of latin roots if you're interested in this method of improving your vocabulary. That way you don't have to learn all the complicated sentence structures and conjugations involved with Latin.
Finally, there are workbooks and such that can help improve your vocab. We had this workbook in my AP Language and Comp class last year called Joy of Vocab, that was actually did improve my vocab. I don't know where you would go about getting a copy though. In my AP Lang class we also had to read a book called 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. This book also helped improve my vocab, and it's not a schoolbook or anything. Link
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