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Fieldlearning
Jan. 2, 2006
Seventh Day of Christmas
Forgive me while I catch up on the days of Christmas - I was outside DC for a few days visiting family!
On the Seventh Day of Christmas the Fieldlearning blog gave to me seven websites about words.
Merriam-Webster On-line has some neat features, including audio pronunciation, a word of the day subscription and a new dictionary for teens and adults learning English as a Second Language.
The American Heritage dictionary has words indexed by whether or not they have notes in certain catagories like: word histories and synonyms.
If you really need to know a word history, try here or here (a monthly word origin webzine).
Onto the Eighth Day!
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Jul. 28, 2005
Telling Stories
Our family had the opportunity to see children's author and illustrator Steven Kellogg give a presentation at our county library last night. You may be familiar with his Pinkerton books, like Pinkerton, Behave about a large black and white great dane or one of the other 110 books he's published since the 1960's.
He started by talking about how he got started in writing and how he
loved telling stories. He told us how Pinkerton entered his life and
then the cat, Second-hand Rose. What the room was enthralled with,
however, was when he started drawing sketches on big pieces of paper
and telling a story. This is how he works in his studio. The words,
ideas and lines came so fast and furious. As the plot of the story
takes a turn, he adds a line or two and facial expressions change, a
character dons a hat or a sail fills with air. Then, he stops the
story, "And if you want to find out how it ends, you'll have to read
the book."
He finished by showing slides, some of the real dog
(click on the link in the middle of the page to see the real Pinkerton)
and cat that inspired many of his stories. Others were of books he had
done recently. He also took us through another story and left us to beg
the librarian for a copy so we can find out how it ends!
There were books to purchase (they were discounted and very reasonable,
$4 per softcover) and he stayed to sign and draw a picture in each one.
He did the illustration for our PA library reading program this year.
My daughter was wearing one of the t-shirts, so he drew a picture of
Pinkerton on the back and signed that.
If he's coming to your area and you have grade school children, you'll want to attend.
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Jun. 7, 2005
al~li~ga~tor
My husband loves etymology, so when he
decided to give the kids a mini-lesson in how we got the word
alligator, I wasn't surprised. Apparently he was reading his American Heritage Dictionary and discovered that alligator comes from the Spanish el lagarto,
the lizard. So, that leads into a mini-history lesson about Spanish
explorers in Florida. But, how you may ask, as we did, does el lagarto turn into alligator? Well, of course the American Heritage tells us: Such
changes, referred to by linguists as taboo deformation, are not
uncommon in a name for something that is feared and include, for
example, the change in sequence of the r and t that occurred between el lagarto and alligator.
This led to more discussion about words and the English language.
Apparently, our 9 year old thought that "Old English" was when people
used thee and thou.
Well, it makes sense, and her observation that English has changed is a
good one. When dad reached back into his memory for the opening lines of the Canterbury Tales (hear
it by clicking) she realized that Middle English is basically a
different language than Modern English. Who knows where this will lead?
If a common word like alligator can take you back to the Middle Ages, I wonder where you'd end up in a discussion of the origin of school .
If you like word history or want to find want to do more than have your
children memorize greek and latin roots, check out this Take Our Word.
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