June 27, 2007
Of obsequious, deleterious and deleterious

One hundred words every high school graduate should know.  Really?  Surely not.  ‘Till now I’ve wandered through life relatively certain the hallowed halls of college were my educational Waterloo but should the Houghton-Mifflin folks know from where they speak, this kid making it through today’s high school would be problematical at best.

Over at American Heritage Dictionaries, published by the afore mentioned H-M, editors compiled a list of 100 words and go on to suggest each and every high school graduate should feel comfortable with all on hundred.  Check it out and you might just wonder what high school the Houghton-Mifflin word geeks attended?  It sure wasn’t Cambridge High, home of the Vikings in Western Illinois.  Here I thought Miss Westerlund a meanie for insisting I memorize passages from “Thanatopsis”.  Turns out she was a marshmallow when it came to vocabulary. 

Not to quibble with the intellectual set but where, in the course of everyday life, is one penalized by having an intimate familiarity with words like moiety (a half), quotidian (a placid everyday scene) and ziggurat (a type of temple tower common to the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians of ancient Mesopotamia)?  Well, other than a George Orbanek Sunday Sentinel column. 

According to senior editor Steven Kleinedier, explaining why high school students should be intimately familiar with the likes of tautology, taxonomy and tectonic, “The words we suggest are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves.” 

Well, I measured away and found you know who coming up quite short in what is supposedly the ground floor of sound grammatical knowledge in 2007.  Oh, there were some recognizable offerings on the list.  Paradigm, a word always bordered by “ever shifting”, was a favorite of the touchy-feely set back in the nineties and equinox was a week ago today, but gamete, enervate, evanescent and unctuous?  

C’mon, does anyone really use these words in everyday conversation? Say you find me, word list in hand, on a barstool downing a cold one, which come to think of it, is a mighty fine place to be found on a hot summer afternoon. Mid-quaff, in the interest of neighborly conversation, I mention to the total stranger on the adjacent stool, the best TV moment of the past few years was witnessing the myriad empty seats vacated by the front runners of all frontrunners, Colorado Yankee fans, unable to handle their Bronx Bombers getting smoked by our Rox last week.  And suppose the stranger has also memorized the one hundred words and responds,  “Not to appear supercilious and resisting the temptation toward loquaciousness but your obsequious attitude toward the vacuous recreation of baseball spectating leaves me jejune.” 

That statement would then leave me the option of, after checking the list, responding, “While your opinion is extremely multi-syllabic in nature, it’s also true it could not be more tautological.”  Fortunately, in moments of conversational stress,  one returns to their conversational roots.  As an Iowa State alum, this means utilizing the grammatical tools that pass for intellectual repartee in the land of corn by growling, “Hey Dude, bite me!”