Of Roots and Wrongness

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mandrake, Odysseus, roots, synonyms, wrongness

The mandrake plant, where the root is interpreted as a naked man, is from the 1440, ‘Tractatus de Herbis’ seen at the British Museum (Codex Sloane 4016). The bifurcated root was said to resemble a man that when pulled from the earth would shriek, so people believed. Digging to the roots of these words too led to shrieking: some shrieks of amazement, some of frustration. In the making of these videoclips, no students were under the influence of mandrake, a member of the deadly nightshade family. No dogs were harmed!

So many of the day to day class activities flow into and build on each other and yet they all begin with words. We are currently reading the graphic novel of The Odyssey by Gareth Hinds. This is an accessible entry into this classic text with rich language that echoes some of the great translations. Earlier in the week we began an examination of Odysseus’s character:

‘Sing to me O Muse, of that man of many troubles, Odysseus…’

I heard one student say they weren’t too sure whether they liked him or not- “Look at his bragging to Polyphemous, the Cyclops, he certainly was not faithful to Penelope, and look what he did with the suitors and the handmaidens on his return!” And yet –Odysseus’s determination or is it persistence(?) his clever trickery, his focus on returning home and his determined embrace of life and mortality- all this makes him a fascinating character, human and in the end (to this reader) flawed but likeable.

We explored various traits that could be applied to Odysseus. Students analysed these words into morphemes, identified the root and the base.

Here’s Temira’s initial work carried out with a partner. At this stage she has only copied the dictionary denotation. Later she and the class will write this in their own words to indicate their understanding and in doing so make connections with the root. You will notice letters in red where students marked the letters in the root that have carried on into the present day base element. I felt this was valuable in allowing an understanding to grow between root and base and for students to see how the root influences the orthography.

Word, denotation, morphemes and root. Letters in the root that have been carried over into the orthography in the base element are marked.

Here’s the next phase of this inquiry where students were asked to:

1.Place words in a category (below) based on your understanding of the denotation (read very carefully) and knowledge of the meaning of the root.

2. After you have placed these, decide which word of the pair or trio most applies to Odysseus. Make this bold (or change its colour).

This student has ranked the pairs or trio of words from least to most negative. The words bolded and marked in red are those that the he and his group feel apply most to Odysseus.

Phase three had the students placing the words on a continuum from less negative to more negative.

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This led to a lot of discussion as to subtle differences between words. You’ll note how I attempted, not especially successfully, to push students beyond a simple claim..”I think Odysseus is ..” to begin to justify their reasoning and in doing so reference both the current denotation and the root meaning as well as citing specific evidence from the text to support their claim. Obviously this is a skill we will continue to  (and need to) work on all year. Once again these recordings teach me so much about student thinking, both individually and collectively. It, as ever, gives me pause to consider my tendency to steer rather than allow students more time to draw their own conclusions! My mantra after watching these clips below is to  : Be more silent! Ask more open ended questions…..!

 

 

 

 

 

What’s needed?

• More practice doing just this and reading Online Etymology Dictionary
• Justifying a claim

What was gained in this lesson evolving over several sessions?

• Rich discussion both about the subtle nuances between these synonyms
• Rich discussion about the character of Odysseyeus
• Experience in using references such as Online Etymology Dictionary and the Mac Dictionary to identify the root.
• It’s not about “rightness” or “wrongness”- it’s about evidence!

Rightness and Wrongness:

I’ve been thinking a lot about “rightness” and “wrongness” recently and in particular, my students’ obsession to get it “right” or hunt down the “right answer” and in the speed of light! It is not that getting it right is wrong – I want air traffic control to get it right when landing planes, I want any surgeons working on me to get it right, I want other drivers on the road heading towards me to get it right. However, in my humanities class I want students to take risks in their thinking and that means being able to embrace “wrongness”. I want my students to be able to listen to others and question, to be able to change their thinking when the evidence warrants this, to slow down rather than leap to swift certainties. I am frequently guilty of leaping to swift judgements, assumptions and regard these as “right” interpretations or correct answers. My students consistently show me the importance of slowing it down, the value of weighing the evidence. Watch below as this student works through her “wrongness”. The photo below shows her initial thinking:

 

 

 

By the end of the session, this student had been able to recognize that <term> was a free base element from Latin terminare: to finish, to reach the boundaries. Her partner had recognized the word’ term’ and ‘determined’ that this did indeed share the same root. Unfortunately, the memory card on the camera was full as her observations about the process she went through to reach this understanding was illuminating. She said:

“If you’d just told me the answer, I wouldn’t have understood. I was uncertain but I needed to slow down and think through and keep asking questions. I needed time and questions”. And I would add not the pressure of getting the answer right. She and I both learned so much from her “wrongness”.

Go here to read Kathryn Schultz’s blog The Wrong Stuff on Slate Magazine. Her blog interviews people ‘on their relationship to being wrong’. Watch her Ted talk On Being Wrong

‘The mandrake is a plant; its roots grow in human form, male and female, and shriek when torn from the ground. It is of great use in medicine, but anyone who hears the plant’s cry dies or goes mad. It was therefore a custom to tie a hungry dog to the plant by a cord and place a piece of meat beyond its reach. To get at the meat the dog tugged at the cord and dragged up the plant, while its master remained safely out of hearing.’

And look at the ‘wrongness’ in the beliefs about the mandrake plant and in the folk etymologizing of ‘mandrake’ as a word.A German belief was that’ the plant springs from the drippings of a man hanged on a gallows. Hence in Germany the plant bears the popular name of the Little Gallows Man. It is, or used to be, believed in that country that when a hereditary thief, born of a family of thieves, or one whose mother stole while he was in her womb, is hanged on a gallows, and his seed or urine falls on the ground, the mandrake or Little Gallows Man sprouts on the spot’!

Mandrake is a compound word connecting drakes with dragons and of both Greek and Old English roots. The root ( of the plant, not the word!) resembles both a human figure and a phallus. Shakespeare references the belief that when pulled from the ground it shrieks. Juliet in her final soliloquy, says with the fatal phial of poison in her hand:

‘So early waking, what with loathsome smells,

And shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth,

That living mortals hearing them run mad.’

mandrake (n.) ‘narcotic plant, early 14c., mondrake, from Medieval Latin mandragora, from Latin mandragoras, from Greek mandragoras, probably from a non-Indo-European word. The word was in late Old English in its Latin form; folk etymology associated the second element with dragoun and substituted native drake in its place. The forked root is thought to resemble a human body and is said to shriek when pulled from the ground. ‘ ( Online Etymology Dictionary)

Go here for more: drake and dragon

What led to the beliefs that the mandrake shrieked? What does this one word tell us about the time and the culture?  Read about Mandrake here.

Remember Mandrake the magician? This character, superhero’s powers lie in the hypnotic qualities of his gestures so that his subjects succumb to illusions. Surely an allusion to the narcotic properties of the mandrake plant. Read here and watch here created by Lee Falk (before he created  another childhood favorite The Phantom). Note the Falk wrote while Davis worked on the strip until his death in 1964.  Falk then organized for Fred Fredericks to illustrate the comics until Falk died in 1999. Fredericks became both writer and artist. The Sunday Mandrake strip ended December 29, 2002.

Mandrake creator Lee Falk:Guardian Obituary

 

 

 

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What’s in a Name?

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Alan Bennett, Edward Gorey, names

‘Tomorrow I brew, today I bake,
Soon the child is mine to take
Oh what luck to win this game,
Rumpelstiltskin is my name’.
From The Annotated Brothers Grimm, edited Maria Tatar
Illustrated here by Edward Gorey at the moment of the name revelation.

“I will give you three days,” he declared. “If by then you can guess my name.”

The  brothers Grimm tale Rumpelstiltskin reminds us of the potency of a name. According to Maria Tatar, “Knowing the name of your antagonist represents a form of control, a way of containing the power of the adversary and having influence over his soul.” Tartar goes onto explain that names are a vital part of one’s identity and in myths and fairytales, careless revelations can lead to transformations. Below students touch on the phonesthemic qualities in their name and explore the etymologies and family history behind their naming. No careless revelations and no beastly transformations!

Students have read Sandra Cisernos’s extract from House on Mango Street where the character discusses her name  ‘Esperanza’ and in doing so reflects her personality, values, as well as the etymology and story behind her name. Students have spent time talking to their parents about their names and the stories behind this. For some it’s as simple as their parents just liked the sound, for others it’s a tie to the past or wishes for the child’s future. Students have found that names, like words have a history, an etymology, and have investigated this in their writing.

Masculinity and femininity inherent in names :

Names too carry a sound sense with them suggesting maleness or femaleness. Many female British or European names tend more to the polysyllabic, whereas more male names are monosyllabic. 95% of male names have a heavily stressed first syllable whereas far less female names do this. Crystal (Encyclopaedia of the English Language,153) indicates that over the past 75 years none of the popular male names had an unstressed first syllable ( Patrick, Jonathan, Robert, Christopher, William). Female names usually have a stressed high front vowel /i/. In our class we see this in the names: Tiffany. Often female names end with a spoken vowel: Mari, Hannah, Temirah, Chloe, Anna, Jemma, Tatiania, Nikoletta, Athina,Emma, Shania. If not ending with a vowel sound, the final sound will be a continuant in female names: /l/ Michelle,or the nasal continuants such as /m/,/n/: Kathleen, Madeleine.

It’s been suggested that high forward vowels create a sense of smallness associated with femininity. Consider the size of the opening of the mouth and where your tongue is when you pronounce these vowels: Back vowels such as / a/ /o/ create a sense of strength, largeness and therefore ‘maleness’. This research is also borne out by the research project of Dr Alan McElligott from Queen Mary University of London, Dr AlexMesoudi from Durham University and Benjamin Pitcher who investigated whether the preferences for particular male and female names in the English language could have developed as a ‘product of the sound symbolic frequency code and preferred sexual traits’. They found that males names were more likely to contain larger sounding (low-back)/ a/ /o/ phonemes than smaller sounding (high-front) phonemes. ‘English-language first names therefore appear to follow the sexual size dimorphism observed in human body size.’. Read more here: 

Authors’ use of names:

I began to wonder about the phonesthemic qualities in various character names, particularly in Dickens. Consider Ebeneezer Scrooge. The sound of Scrooge’s name seems to reflect the character’s miserly stinginess, the unpleasantness and heartlessness. Perhaps an association between scrounge and screw, scrimping and scraping. Look at /skr/ in Shisler’s Dictionary of Phonesthemes.

Elizabeth Gordon, in her thesis on Dicken’s choice of character names, notes ‘It is not an easy matter to say just why these names should seem to be so appropriate, but in some instances the sound of the word produces an impression similar to that caused by the character itself, and in others there is an inexplicable “eternal fitness” that baffles investigation’

Gordon suggests ‘Simon Tappertit, with a name made up of short vowels and voiceless consonants, could never succeed in being a heavy villain, especially since his tripping name carries with it an echo of tap, dapper, and the diminutive tit. Mr. Bumble’s name calls to the mind of a child the unpleasant officiousness of a bumble-bee; but the word may have had rise in an English term of contempt for an unpopular dignitary, the bumbailiff, shortened by influence of the verb bumble-to scold.’(26)

My students familar with Dahl can see how Dahl too suggests character traits through the name: Miss Trunchbull from Matilda is a noteable example.

Fragments from student writing about their names :

‘My name is Irish. It means full of honour. It comes from the Latin name Patricius, which meant “nobleman”. The name Patrick, was not given in Ireland before the 17th-century because it was too sacred for everyday use. After that, it became very common there. The name was adopted by Saint Patrick in the 5th- Century, whose birth name is Sucat. This name was used in honour of the saint during the middle ages. Saint Patrick was also known for driving the snakes out of Ireland. There are no snakes in Ireland, that is a fact, but there probably never was. It is pretty cool to be named after someone who was a hero. It is also a coincidence that St. Patrick’s day is celebrated on March 17th. My birthday is on October 17th.

Patrick. The sound of the name was beautiful. It was like music to my parents’ ears. My name is not common in Indonesia and it is not an Indonesian name, but my Indonesian parents picked it because they liked the sound of it. They thought it fitted me perfectly. There was no special reason they picked Patrick. They just liked it. After all, it meant full of honour. I think that is what they expected me to be, full of honour’.

‘I really like my name. It’s just that when other people who are not familiar with Indian names try to say it, they say something like “Roheet”. It takes a while to correct this. It’s pronounced without a stressed “i” and there is an “h” sound at the end of it. Sometimes, it can be written with an “h” at the end; mostly, it’s not. In India, it’s a name from the South. And even then, it isn’t the most common name. My dad chose this name for me because of it’s meaning and with the hope that I would embody it’s characteristics. (Not literally, of course.)

Rohit originates in Sanskrit. It symbolizes the color red. Rohit means “The first rays of the sun” in Sanskrit. In the morning, the sky is mostly red and orange. Rohit also signifies the red deer, which is called a “Rohitah” in Sanskrit. In mythology, this was the form that the Indian god Brahma once took. My name is also one of the many names of the mythological god Vishnu, who first came to earth in the form of a beautiful red fish. The name also pops up in the “Vishnu Sahasranam”, or in English, “The 1000 Names of Vishnu”. Another mythological god, Krishna, had a son that was also named Rohit. The name also means someone who will lead to the growth and development of his family.’

‘Manan is a name and a word with meanings in various languages. It means to stay calm, meditate. It is the color blue as it brings a calm feeling to the mind. My name is one of names of a Hindu God. My name is one of the last names the Hindu God Krishna.The color of my name is blue as Krishna’s true form is as a blue immortal. Also he has a blue peacock feather on his ear which has blue in the center. His flute brings soothing tunes to your ear that keep you calm in the most furious times.’

‘‘In Latin my name means young. In French my name means youth. The Italians spell it with just six letters. The French spell it with eight.  My name is a reminder of a tragic love story. The color purple, the sound of rich classical music, the heavy evening scent of jasmine flowers. You probably know my name because of William Shakspeare. He chose Romeo to be the ill-fated lover of Juliet.

This name is all my own. It’s not a family name. My family has a lot of hard to pronounce Dutch and Irish names such as Dreesje, Sjoerd Lodewijk, Aiobh and Eamonn. Thankfully, my parents chose an easy to pronounce and an internationally recognizable name for me. They knew that I would live all around the world and they didn’t want me to experience the hardship of people not being able to say or remember my name.’

Nicknames:

As a class we also discussed nicknames, which led to an investigation of this word. In the 1300s it was ekename from eke name meaning additional name as the root of eke is OE eacian to increase. Nickname therefore has been formed by misdivision.

An Australian tendency with nicknames is to add diminutives such as ‘ie’ to a name or add an ‘o’ or even an ‘s’ to create feelings of warmth and display friendliness: so Sharon becomes Shazza, Barry Baz or Bazza, Darren becomes Daz or Dazza. (This is an interesting pattern here where the ‘r’ is replaced by ‘z’.) Deb becomes, Debs or Dave to a Davo, Rob to Robbo. Read  the transcript of a radio interview on Australian nicknames with Kate Burridge:

Alan Bennett’s Names from Telling Tales

The last word on names should be with the brilliant Alan Bennet. Delicately balanced between tragedy and comedy, his writing is poignant, wistful, wry. Below Alan Bennett reflects on names as a person ages. He shows that names reflect a generation, a slice of time as well as a determination to distance a baby from age. He reminds readers that whatever the name,however assiduously we bequeath a vibrant name avoiding the elderly or geriatric, age is inevitable. Listen for the sheer pleasure of hearing a writer who is indeed a master of words.

’Sharons don’t suffer from dementia’ He notes too how “The trumpet has not yet sounded for Trevor..but it will” or somewhat bleakly ”Soon the listless watchers by the radiator will be Melanie” He remarks on the gentrifying of names, of the class status of names. Of today’s Jacobs, he sees that they have been ‘sanded down and all its biblical varnish gone’.

More name entertainment:

Find the rise and fall in popularity of names with Name Voyager: 

Read about British Naming Trends: Guardian data :

Coder writer and data analyst: Anna Powell-Smith

For fun, play with the literary baby name generator: created by Oxford word blog

Misdivisions:

For those who are fascinated by misdivisions as seen in ‘nickname’. ( A great investigation for the class at some later stage- so many words, so many poetntial inquiries!) here’s a small list to whet the appetite:

nugget perhaps ingot, notch, ninny, lone,newt,size, apron,auger,adder, humble pie.

Check out Other misdivisions from Online Etymology Dictionary.

More Edward Gorey:

BrainPickings:

Goreyography

Enwrought by Phonethsemes

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enwrought, phonesthemes, Yeats

THE NIGHT HAS GONE (1947) Jack Yeats brother of William Butler ‘The artist walks alone in the landscape , his head surrounded by the night sky above the low horizon. But the night is rolling away, and light is breaking out in the east’- Jack B. Yeats, A Catalogue Raisonne of the Oil Paintings by Hilary Pyle, No 876, page 791, Vol II’

Kate Burridge when discussing phonesthemes references Alice of Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass fame, who on hearing the poem Jabberwocky said, “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas — only I don’t exactly know what they are!”

And this is the effect of phonesthemes which lacks the precision of a morpheme, but has an ‘associative’ force sparked by sound. Awareness of the phonesthemes this week sparked conversations about the ’feel’ and connotations of words.

Consider the effect of the letters ‘odge’ in the final position in a base element. Words like ‘splodge’, ‘podge’ ‘stodge’, and ‘stodgy’ create an impression of heavy solidity , of lumpiness. (A fascinating orthographic inquiry is to investigate why some words end with the digraph <ge> and some with trigraph <dge> to create the phoneme / dʒ/. One student and I pursued this recently, but for the rest of the class, this will be investigated on another day!)

We too discussed this week <sn> in an initial position. A mad race calling out many words – many having a nasaly, whining, unpleasantness, a nose curling condescension: snitch, sneer, snarl, snort, sniff, snide, snivel, snore, snicker, snoop,snob.

And why this phonesthemic leap? We had begun the year learning two poems revolving around dreams: ‘Dreams’ by Langston Hughes and ‘Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ by WB Yeats. It was the second line of Yeats’s beautiful poem, ‘Had I the Heaven’s embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light’ that triggered this particular word inquiry.

On student asked about the meaning ‘enwrought’ (archaic, poetic as indicated by OED) unaware that he was instigating a venture down a slippery (and the initial consonant cluster ‘sl’ is also well worth a phonesthetic investigation: slide, slink, slop,slope) side-path of phonesthemes.

The Phonethseme<wr>

We discovered two elements in the word ‘enwrought’: a prefix <en-> and a free base element <wrought> from mid 13th c. past participle of the O.E. root for work. What other words began with <wr>? What underlying sense did these words suggest?

Once again the class was off and enthusiastically calling out words:

‘writ, wrench, wrinkle,

wrap, wrestle, writhe,

wrangle,wreak, wrath

wreck,wrist,wriggle,

wrought’

We investigated the origins of all these words and discovered Germanic /O.E. roots. All words conveyed a sense of twistedness, of distortion. Read Online Etyomology Dictionary here about<wr->.

Here are additional words we discovered:

‘wrawl’ of a cat, to caterwaul

‘wraxle’ and ‘wraxling’ S.E .Eng dialect word for wrestle

‘writhen’ archaic adj for ‘writhe/wrythen’

From Spenser, I discovered: ‘wrizled’ as an adjective meaning wrinkled (not sure I want to be either!)

 ‘wroath’ Shakespearean meaning misfortune perhaps from ruth.

The most intriguing award goes to the ‘wrybill’, a wading bird native to  New Zealand, whose sideways curving bill ‘wrests’ food from under rocks.

The New Zealand Wry-Bill: a vulnerable species of wading birds endemic to New Zealand.

The Prefix <en->

The prefix <en-> proved interesting here as well. I am familiar with <en-> from ‘ensure’ as opposed to ‘insure’ and have often wondered vaguely about inquire/enquire and whether there was a subtle difference in meaning. Fowlers’ Modern English Usage allows for both forms emphasising the subtle difference with ‘inquire‘ as investigatory and ‘enquiry’ as informal querying. Burridge cites the work of linguist Pam Peters who notes inquiry outnumbers 10-1 enquiry in written text. Burridge writes that ‘imported words with the <en-> prefix came from French and <in-> from Latin.’ Oxford English Dictionary states that:

‘From 14th cent. onwards the prefix in- (im- ) has been frequently substituted for en- (em- ); and, conversely, en- (em- ) has been substituted for the prefix in- (im- ) of words of Latin or Italian origin, and for the native English in- prefix¹. Nearly every word, of long standing in the language, which is formed with en- has at some period been written also with in- . Hence it is often impossible to determine whether in a particular word of English formation the prefix en- or in- is due to the analogy of words of French, Latin, or purely English origin.‘

This fascinating  entry goes on to raise issues of ‘etymological fitness’ and attempts to purify the language: ‘The substitution of in- for en- has in part been due to notions of etymological fitness, the Romanic en- having been regarded as a corrupt and improper form of the Latin in-, while the English formations in en- were either referred to Latin analogies or treated as compounds of the native preposition’.

I read with interest that ‘the now prevailing tendency is to use en- (em- ) in English formations’. Perhaps that is why Yeats chose ‘enwrought’ rather than ‘inwrought’ , yet in my Mac Oxford Dictionary it is only ‘inwrought’ that has made it into the dictionary: with the following denotation: ‘adjective literary, (of a fabric or garment) intricately embroidered with a pattern or decoration’.

This <en-> foray led us to the following wonderful discovery of many entertaining forms of words, once more common:

† enlabyrinth:v. Obs. to entangle as in a labyrinth. 1652 E.Benlowes Theophila i. liii. 8 ‘My Soul, enlabyrinth’d in Grief’.

† ennet v. Obs. to entangle.1598 J. Florio Worlde of Wordes,To ensnare or take in a net or ginne,to entramell,to ennet.

† enjourney v. Obs. (refl.) to start on a journey. 1596 R. Linche Dom Diego in Diella sig. F6v, The next day, They would eniourney them.

englamour v. to surround with 1864 Dicey in Daily Tel. 15 July, The memory of a great past still englamours them [the Danes].

† enstomach v. Obs. to encourage.1545 T. Raynalde Womans Bk. 59 The midwife..enstomakyng her to pacience.

† encouch:v. Obs. to lay upon a couch, fig.1596 Raigne of Edward III sig. B4v, Encouch the word..with such sweete laments.

† engrape v. Obs. to cover with grapes.1523 J. Skelton Goodly Garlande of Laurell (Dyce) 656 Vinis engrapid.

† endart v. Obs.1599 Shakespeare Romeo & Juliet i. iii. 100 ‘More deepe will I endart mine eye’.

enfuddle v.1822 J. Wilson in Blackwood’s Mag. 12 113 Punch our powers insidiously enfuddles.

engarble v. to mutilate.1609 Bp. W. Barlow Answer Catholike English-man 73 The engarbled Anatomie of a damned wretch.

engladden v.1874 E. B. PUSEY Lenten Serm. 246 Thee..Who didst..engladden..me.

enlanguish v. Obs. to render languid.1603 J. FLORIO tr. Montaigne Ess. III. xiii. 647 It is pittie a man should be so..enlanguished.1654 A. COKAYNE tr. G. F. Loredano Dianea IV. 329 Her eyes, enlanguished by griefe.

enwisen v. to make wise.1860 E. B. PUSEY Minor Prophets 427 Enwisening, rejoicing, enlightening the soul.

Perhaps now you too like me are ennetted in this <en-> list. Enwisened and engladdedned by these discoveries you will encouch and engrape yourself reaching perchance a state of enlanguishment!

And to return finally to where we began with Yeats. Listen to the students who below recite this poem and enticed by the ‘taste’ and the sound of the words have grappled it to their hearts. We discussed the last lines of the poem and have taken the last lines to heart reminding ourselves of the need to ‘tread softly’ with one another, all of us vulnerable, all of us learning to be open, to take risks in our thinking and to collaborate  and challenge one another in a respectful way as we together build our year long learning community.

 

 

 

My own copy of the poem- a gift from my daughter Kezia. Printed by Cuala Press, established by Elizabeth ‘Lolly’ Yeats, sister of William, Jack and Lilly.

The print on the left of the poem was created by Cuala Press, formerly Dun Emer, established to support the Irish arts and craft movement.This press  set up by the Yeats sisters was the only press run solely by women. They published 48 titles of WB Yeats, as well as works by Ezra Pound, Jack Yeats, Robin Flower, Elizabeth Bowen,Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, John Masefield, Frank O’Connor, Synge and Rabindranath Tagore and others.

Read more about Cuala Press, operational until 1946.

Read about Jack Yeats, hero of Colm Toibin who felt Jack captured the instablity of the Irish light. “He saw its swirling, cloud-laden movements as pure gift.’ Both brothers intrigued by the light.

Read more about the vulnerable Wrybill.

 

Disentangling Perplexity

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terminology

Etching of early eyeglasses . Apparently in 1268 Roger Bacon made the earliest comment on using lenses for optical purposes. Magnifying glasses were used  for reading in both China and the West. While these spectacles bring clarity to the world so too does linguistic terminology bring focus and precision to our class discourse about words. As these gentlemen above stare intently at what is sharply in focus.. so too do the students stare intently through the lens of terminology at words!

“When I took the first survey of my undertaking, I found our speech copious without order, and energetick without rules: wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled, and confusion to be regulated; choice was to be made out of boundless variety, without any established principle of selection; adulterations were to be detected, without a settled test of purity;and modes of expression to be rejected or received, without the suffrages of any writers of classical reputation or acknowledged authority“. Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface’ to A Dictionary of the English Language

‘One sign of immaturity [in a science] is the endless flow of terminology.The critical reader begins to wonder if some strange naming taboo attaches to the terms that a linguist uses, whereby when he dies they must be buried with him.’ Dwight Bolinger, Aspects of Language, p. 554

This week we have focused on terminology and while linguist Dwight Bolinger alerts us to the endless flow of terminology and strange naming taboos of linguists , Samuel Johnson, although talking about the language in the 18th century and of his hopes for his great dictionary undertaking, reminds us of perplexity and confusion ( See Word Nerds: ‘Respect for the Harmless Drudge’). This murk of confusion and perplexity among students when talking about words only obfuscates. To think about and explore words and then make connections to literature, poetry, history, current events and express these connections with clarity, we need precise language and precision of thought and so we plunged into an inquiry based around morphological terminology.

We started this foray by encouraging students to question one another in the class about their understanding of the morphological terms through an activity known as “Find someone Who”. This was a brief 5 minute activity designed to get students talking and thinking about the terms they would later be investigating more thoroughly. Note the buzz of excitement and the questioning.

Students have analysed various words in the past two weeks and peeled off affixes to reveal base elements. They labelled these elements in word sums : prefix, base element, indicating whether it was free or bound, identified suffixes, and connectors  in earlier sessions to gain a sense of the structure of words. This week’s exercise, conducted in 20 minute bouts over three days, exposed misconceptions and provided a way students could state what they knew as well as, and perhaps even more importantly, that which was unclear. This activity allowed them to ask questions to clarify  confusion and perplexity. They worked collaboratively, built knowledge together and used data of their earlier word analysis to make carefully worded statements about each term and make connections to show relationships of the terms.

Watch students as they work on the relationships of the terms. I was amazed by the thinking, reflection and focus the groups exhibited in making sense of the terms.

I remain impressed by the thinking that occurs and the questions that follow when we ask students to make connections, when we use inquiry rather than lecture giving dry definitions and tell them to learn this. By allowing students to struggle and to continue to demand precision in their explanations, they surprise me with their insight or reveal that which I too often assume is understood. This activity then allows for a deeper understanding when explanations are finally given. Look at their charts below where they explore their understanding so far in this morphological journey.

Showing understanding and relationship between terms

Showing relationships and understandings of morphological terms

Below the students new vision of words:

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Emphasizing clarity, subtle as a sledgehammer, but fun… :I Can See Clearly Now: Jimmy Cliff at Glastonbury 2011.