Monthly Archives: October 2007

The 100 words every high school graduate should know

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The editors of the American Heritage dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.

“The words we suggest,” says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, “are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.”

It is an interesting list, I have put a few of the words below but for the full list go here.

abjure, bellicose, chicanery, deleterious, epiphany, totalitarian, unctuous, vacuous, winnow, xenophobe, yeoman, ziggurat.

How many do you know?

Examples of Oratory

Oratory is the art of public speaking. When we study speeches in class we look at how an orator can stir emotion through speech. In the following three examples public speaking has been raised to a performing art. You may have seen some of them as they have all been popular on youtube but they are worth watching again.

The first speech is by Paul Hawken who was speaking at Bioneers 2006. Hawken has spent over a decade researching organisations dedicated to restoring the environment and fostering social justice. He speaks softly but he is very persuasive in delivering his very powerful message. Note how well he connects to his audience.

The second speaker Taylor Mali has been very popular on the internet. The title of the speech is ‘What do teachers really make.’ Mali is both a teacher and a slam poet and his delivery style is very powerful. Slam poetry is a form of performance poetry that occurs within a competitive poetry event, called a “slam”, at which poets usually perform their own poems that are “judged” on a numeric scale by randomly picked members of the audience. Taylor Mali is considered to be the most successful poetry slam strategist of all time, having led six of his seven national poetry slam teams to the finals stage and winning the championship itself a record four times. This speech is the best example of public speaking as performance.

The last speaker Randy Pausch has had a great deal of media coverage. Professor Pausch suffers from pancreatic cancer and was told he had three to six months of good health left and as a result he crafted this speech as his last lecture. Pausch has said that the lecture really was for his kids, “but if others are finding value in it, that is wonderful.” He modestly commented “but rest assured; I’m hardly unique.” I am sure you will disagree after you have watched the clip.

The whole lecture is available at Google Video. It does have quite a long introduction (about 8 minutes) that you might like to skip.

Word Trivia

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more funny pictures


I found this interesting trivia on The English Teacher Blog. How many of these facts did you already know?

  • The English word with the most consonants in a row is latchstring.
  • Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning “containing arsenic.” The only word in English with all five vowels in reverse order is subcontinental.
  • The only word that consists of two letters, each used three times, is deeded.
  • Rhythm and syzygy are the longest English words without vowels.
  • The longest one-syllable words in the English language are screeched and strengths.
  • The longest words that can be typed using only the left hand are stewardesses and reverberated. The longest word that can be typed using only the right hand is lollipop.
  • No words in the English language rhyme with orange, silver, month, or purple.
  • Indivisibility is the only word in English with only one vowel which occurs six times.
  • Bookkeeper and bookkeeping are the only words in English with three consecutive double letters.
  • Only four English words end in -ous: tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

Don’t knock trivia – look at how far it got this guy.