Quotation Of The Day:Vocabulary And Education

From E.D. Hirsch:

It isn’t overstating the case to say that the most secure way to predict whether an educational policy is likely to help restore the middle class is to focus on the question: Is this policy likely to expand the vocabularies of 12th-graders?

Hirsch may be correct, but his Common Core disciples and their STEM allies aren't producing those policies.

Quote Of The Day: The Power Of Negative Thinking Edition

I've written before that I don't really view the world in "glass half full" or "glass half empty" dichotomies. In my world the glass is always cracked and leaking. At long last, someone has written a book that I might agree with. Oliver Burkeman who has written The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking has written a s New York Times op-ed that illustrates why positive thinking may not not be quite as wonderful as its supporters allege:

Though much of this research is new, the essential insight isn’t. Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers understood the need to balance the positive with the negative, optimism with pessimism, a striving for success and security with an openness to failure and uncertainty. The Stoics recommended “the premeditation of evils,” or deliberately visualizing the worst-case scenario. This tends to reduce anxiety about the future: when you soberly picture how badly things could go in reality, you usually conclude that you could cope. Besides, they noted, imagining that you might lose the relationships and possessions you currently enjoy increases your gratitude for having them now. Positive thinking, by contrast, always leans into the future, ignoring present pleasures.

Buddhist meditation, too, is arguably all about learning to resist the urge to think positively — to let emotions and sensations arise and pass, regardless of their content. It might even have helped those agonized firewalkers. Very brief training in meditation, according to a 2009 article in The Journal of Pain, brought significant reductions in pain — not by ignoring unpleasant sensations, or refusing to feel them, but by turning nonjudgmentally toward them.

From this perspective, the relentless cheer of positive thinking begins to seem less like an expression of joy and more like a stressful effort to stamp out any trace of negativity. Mr. Robbins’s trademark smile starts to resemble a rictus. A positive thinker can never relax, lest an awareness of sadness or failure creep in. And telling yourself that everything must work out is poor preparation for those times when they don’t. You can try, if you insist, to follow the famous self-help advice to eliminate the word “failure” from your vocabulary — but then you’ll just have an inadequate vocabulary when failure strikes.

Even if I didn't agree with Burkeman's sentiments, I'd have to use this quotation because it contains the word rictus, a term I first encountered reading The Big Sleep one of my favorite novels:

“I knew that my mouth was open and the ache at the side of my jaws told me it was open wide and the strained back, mimicking the rictus of death carved upon the face of Harry Jones”

A Beer Commercial As Vocab Lesson

Equanimity

Colleagues

Vernacular

Substantiate

Not bad for 30 seconds.  Hooray big word usage and stuff!

A Vocab Lesson For South Dakota's Republican Party

I tell my students that words and ideas matter.  One should use words precisely to convey ideas clearly.  (I'm a bit less demanding about spelling and neat handwriting.)

South Dakota's Republican Party apparently disagrees with me.  According to a South Dakota GOP press release, Tim Johnson staffer and possible House of Representatives candidate Matt Varilek broke rules, laws, and protocol when he spoke in Mitchell recently.  The party claims that Varilek "delivered vitriolic campaign-style personal attacks against Rep. Kristi Noem." (emphasis mine)

To be "vitriolic" is to express "extreme bitterness and hatred toward somebody or something, or an expression of this feeling in speech or writing."

According to The Mitchell Daily Republic's coverage of the speech,

Varilek said he was struck by Noem’s words when he attended a speech she gave recently in which she said politics are too polarized.

“Well, I couldn’t agree more,” he said. “But that’s kind of like Goliath calling David the bully.”

The phrase "kind of like Goliath calling David a bully" is not vitriol.  It's an allusion, a brief reference to a literary work, mythological character or event, biblical person or event, or a historical person or event.  In addition to committing an allusion without a license, Varilek may be guilty of wry understatement, an ironic remark designed to convey meaning indirectly.  The phrasing certainly is not caustic, bitter, biting, or hateful.

The article reports that Varilek claims that Noem

has supported continuing subsidies for big oil and gas in Congress and he wonders why, since there are no such businesses in South Dakota and the country is in need of tax revenue.


Varilek said a close look at Noem’s campaign finance reports shows she has received thousands of dollars from Exxon, Chevron, Halliburton and other oil and gas companies.


“All of a sudden that vote doesn’t look so mysterious anymore,” he said.

Accusing someone of pandering to campaign supporters now counts as vitriol?  I also thought  such accusations were standard operating procedure.  I believe that people flipping off the President of the United States is vitriolic; accusing him of pandering to Wall Street contributors is probably accurate.  It definitely is not vitriolic.

Maybe the South Dakota Republicans are angry about what he said about the debt ceiling debacle.

Varilek said he was dismayed when Noem sided with House Republicans who threatened to shut down the government this summer. That would have caused severe economic hardships, he said, and he was surprised she adopted that stance.


“It just made so sense at all,” Varilek said. “And I think that’s reckless.”

Most adults thought the debt ceiling debacle was reckless.

Perhaps, Varilek's remarks were ill-timed; they may have been inappropriate. after all the state has only three congressional staffs; they should play nice with each other, and these comments may have angered some of Noem's or Thune's staff.

Even with that concession, I would like to introduce the SDGOP to a new word: "hyperbolic," enlarged beyond truth or reasonableness. Claiming that Varilek's statements are "vitriolic" stretches the meaning of the word beyond any reasonableness." In this instance hyperbole is more dangerous than the alleged vitriol because this hyperbole robs "vitriolic" of its meaning and impact.