ABSTRACT

Our knowledge of words is inextricably bound to our knowledge of the world. Words have depth, their own histories and biographies, revealing to us no less than the archaeology of human thought and history. The histories of words are all around us and they prove much more than a mere curiosity. A good estimate would put the entire lexicon of Old English at around 50,000 words. Our students then, influenced by over 1300 years of history, would outdo any ancient bard. Every word we use in school has a story and a history. Many academic words have their meaning encoded into their spellings, with some unique anomalies and grammatical variations. Using a word four times or more has obvious ramifications for teaching a curriculum. Words of Latin and Greek origin are not just longer, though that is a clear consequence of the influence of more prefixes and suffixes, but they are more precise. For academic subjects, such precision matters.