Vocabulary: One word, all the difference in the world
Well, I was close. One of the great rants in Wallace Shawn's intricate one-man play The Fever did involve coffee. But it wasn't missing milk that tipped the subject into a rage...the coffee itself was missing. No coffee in the house at all! Well, of course you'd fly into a rage:"Look at yourself. Look. You walk so stiffly into your kitchen each morning, you approach your cupboard. And you open it, and reach for the coffee, the coffee you expect to find on its shelf. And it has to be there! And if one morning it isn't there - oh, the hysteria! - the entire world will have to pay! "
And later...
"But what really determines the value of a coat? What is it that determines the price of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "it's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it..."
And, oh, yeah, it's that Wallace Shawn. The Clueless, Toy Story, Deep Space Nine guy. The same.
If all this thinking about our connections to everyone else and the history of our coats and coffee has not given you a headache yet, please, allow me to offer this list of new words to prepare along with previous test words for our Monday quiz. Notice there are some "freebies," some words we've already studied:
acumen (think "acute" and you'll be close)
adverse
averse
agrarian (remember agriculture?)
alloy
aloof
ambiguous
ambivalent
amnesty
bane
all the "circum" words from pages 87-88 of your book
coalesce
complacent
condescend
construe
epigram
epitome
posted by lisa schamess @ 11:07 PM
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