Grammar/Vocabulary

Contumacious means “wilfully obstinate; stubbornly disobedient,” according to Princeton’s Wordnetweb.

I’d never heard or seen the word before I read Ong’s Orality and Literacy. It appears there on page 79.

The Chronicle has an article on (Dis)Liking Standards:

The fact that we don’t have such national standards often leads to confusion among our students. I can’t count the number of times I have handed back a set of papers only to have students come to my office and say, in genuine puzzlement: “But my teacher last semester never said anything about that” or “But that’s not how my last professor told us to do it.”

I don’t doubt them. I know perfectly well, from hallway conversations and department meetings, that I have colleagues who emphasize aspects of English composition that seem trivial to me, and who barely touch on things that strike me as essential. I would imagine that to be true in other disciplines as well. Do we do a disservice to students by not speaking more openly to one another about such discrepancies, and not establishing common standards to which we all aspire?

What does that mean for our students in the classroom?

Awareness of audience, I tell students, should help determine everything from the content of your argument to the choice of vocabulary in any piece of writing.

That’s a lesson that we should help students understand about their experiences in our classrooms as well. If we, as faculty members, conceive of ourselves as distinct audiences to which each student’s learning performance is communicated, then our differing expectations become a more easily comprehensible and justifiable norm for students.

Indeed, the ability to recognize and respond to individual professors may even be one of the most important lessons our students can learn.

“Let’s Eat Grandma!” or “Let’s eat, Grandma!” Punctuation saves lives… It a great tag line and it comes from this page where grammar lovers unite on Facebook.

Found because I read Core Knowledge Blog regularly.

If you found a grammar term and you don’t know what it means, Glossary of Linguistic Terms might help.

Canukois,while commenting on The Chronicle’s fora, said, “That’s just the very tip of the confusion iceberg, I fear.”

I love it. What a great metaphor!

I am hoping that as I teach my students, the confusion iceberg will melt and we will be left with simply enough ice to chill our sodas.

From a Word a Day:

The theory that inanimate objects demonstrate hostile behavior toward us.

[Coined by humorist Paul Jennings as a blend of the Latin res (thing) + French resister (to resist) + existentialism (a kind of philosophy).]

If you ever get a feeling that the photocopy machine can sense when you’re tense, short of time, need a document copied before an important meeting, and right then it decides to take a break, you’re not alone. Now you know the word for it. Here’s a report of scientific experiments confirming the validity of this theory.

Attempting to repeat this scientific experiment, MythBusters did not find that toast landed butter side down.

Toast is more likely to land buttered side-down when dropped.
BUSTED
In an extensive and highly objective test the toast showed no statistical preference for landing buttered side-down or up when dropped. It was an even 50-50 split when the final results were compared. However, when pushed off the side of a table, toast showed preference to flip once and land buttered side down.

So, toast doesn’t love you if you are pushing it.

I put together three different quotes from sources that I thought were relevant for the reading we were doing. Citations are at the end.

“Gothic (goth-IK): a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects. Gothic literature was named for the apparent influence of the dark gothic architecture of the period on the genre. Also, many of these Gothic tales took places in such “gothic” surroundings, sometimes a dark and stormy castle as shown in Mary Wollstoncraft Shelly’s Frankenstein, or Bram Stoker’s infamous Dracula. Other times, this story of darkness may occur in a more everyday setting…. In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were told from many different points of view. This literature gave birth to many other forms, such as suspense, ghost stories, horror, mystery, and also Poe’s detective stories. Gothic literature wasn’t so different from other genres in form as it was in content and its focus on the “weird” aspects of life. This movement began to slowly open may people’s eyes to the possible uses of the supernatural in literature” (Taylor).

“Gothicism is part of the Romantic Movement that started in the late eighteenth century and lasted to roughly three decades into the nineteenth century. The Romantic Movement is characterised by innovation (instead of traditionalism), spontaneity (according to Wordsworth good poetry is a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”), (“Neoclassic and Romantic”) freedom of thought and expression (especially the thoughts and feelings of the poet himself), an idealisation of nature (Romantic poets were also referred to as “nature poets”) and the belief of living in an age of “new beginnings and high possibilities (“Neoclassic and Romantic”)” (Hamberg).

“GOTHIC: TALES OF the macabre, fantastic, and supernatural, usually set amid haunted castles, graveyards, ruins, and wild picturesque landscapes. They reached the height of their considerable fashion in the 1790′s and the early years of the 19th century (Oxford Companion to English Literature, p. 405-06)” (“Literature”).

“The main protagonist is usually a solitary character who has an egocentrical nature. Even though the genre is a phase in the Romantic movement, it is regarded as the forerunner of the modern mystery or science fiction novel” (Hamberg).

“Gothic heroes are trapped in gloom unable to appreciate the light of day. They are the descendants of Cain, Satan, and Prometheus – heroic in their rebellion yet pathetic in their destiny. Their pain and suffering exalt them above the collective and enshrine them in their excruciating settings. In order to depict the shadowside of their heroes, Gothicists used ghostly visitations, especially a device known as a döppleganger, a mirror image of the self” (Hamberg).

“Although Gothic novels were written mainly to evoke terror in their readers, they also served to show the dark side of human nature. They describe the “nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the controlled and ordered surface of the conscious mind” (“The Romantic Period”). Surprisingly, there were a vast number of female Gothic authors. It is not unlikely that this kind of fiction provided a release for the “submerges desires of that . . . disadvantaged class (“The Romantic Period”)” (Hamberg).

Hamberg, Cynthia. “Gothic Literature.” My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstien. 27 September 2007.

“Literature: What genre of literature?” Watershed Online.

Taylor, Jerry. “Gothic.” Glossary of Literary Terms.

Core Knowledge Blog writes on the movie industry’s use of the word language for profanity and their modifier pervasive.

It’s an interesting vocabulary lesson.

I try to keep lists of things that relate to my classes that happen in real life.

So here are the metaphors I remember from Popular Culture:

Lisa Castellano said “circus lessons.”  We’re the ring masters and our classroom is a circus.

Jeremy said “Grand Canyon of oral literature.”  I’m at the top and it is so beautiful.  I see people down there and they are calling for me to join them, but I want others to go with me.  I try to bring them and show them what I see.

Christi Cook used a proverb, “Where there is smoke, there is fire” to talk about the life of women warriors.  If a woman is buried with a sword, that is the smoke that indicates she was a warrior.

Laurie had a mixed metaphor that made me a little queasy:  ”vomit onto the page and chisel something out of it.”  She was talking about how some of her students respond to the writing class.