An Auspicious, Incontrovertible Lexicon Nomenclature Epiphany Chicanery (06-04-2007)

I started a blog at Blogger because I changed email addresses and forgot my password at Wordpress. Most of the stuff I've written over the years is kind of dumb, but some of it might be worth preserving. I'm copying it over here so that when I forget my login info again, I can just copy it from this one place.

The editors of the American Heritage^® dictionaries have announced the list of 100 words that every high school graduate should know (Full list here: Houghton Mifflin Books), and, while I can appreciate the sentiment that a graduate’s vocabulary is important, I have to wonder how this particular list of words was determined.

  
From what I can tell, the list include what looks like a few random medical terms [hemoglobin, ziggurat, etc.], some censorship terms [bowderline, expurgate, etc.], TV types [plasma, Quasar] and animal species [gerrymander, winnow], so while covering a diverse range of topics, it still seems rather arbitrary.

Among the 100, I think I knew 2 (the TV ones), so maybe this is just sour grapes, but it strikes me as a bit presumptuous to place such a qualitative value on certain words.   This type of list seems to promote vocabulary snobbery, and encourages a certain elitist attitude in communication.  A person may impress (or discourage) others with a high caliber and highfalutin collection of words at his disposal, but a truly adept communicator caters to his audience, which often requires a large collection of the “simple” words as well.

So, to offer my 2 cents (or approx. 0.0148336 Euro to use my new vocabulary prowess), here is my list of words that every high school graduate should know (I could only come up with 48):

animal
Awesome
bird
Book
Car
cat
CD
Cent
Cereal
Computer
Cool
Doctor
dog
Dollar
Door
Drink
fish
Food
Friday
Guitar
Her (She)
Him (He, his)
Hot
House
I (me, my)
Ice Cream
Internet
Math
Medicine
mineral
Movie
Music
OK
Paper
Party
Pencil
Phone
Pizza
Play
Rock and Roll
Saturday
Science
Shoes
Sleep
Spaceship
Sunday
vegetable
Website