Creative Advertising or a Sad Truth?
I would consider myself to be an intellectual person. I love learning new things and I did well throughout all of my schooling. I was an honor roll student in high school. So, I was intrigued by something I came across today.
100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know
I graduated high school 7 years ago and have since completed my Bachelors degree. So, naturally I expected that I would know (or at least be familiar with) most of the words on this list.
I was surprised to find that I only know about a third of the words on the list. Granted, I am an artist so I am more of a visual person than a literary person. Also, I have always been more of a numbers kinda gal.
So my question is … is this just a creative advertising stunt to sell a dictionary to parents of high school seniors or should I go hide in the corner because I am the only person over the age of 18 that doesn’t know what a ziggurat is without consulting dictionary.com?
Perhaps, I should take the list of words to my mother who has two PHD’s and see how many she knows. I guarantee she will know more of them than I do.
May 30th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Well I would have to say that I knew half to over half the words…now the disclaimer that comes with this is that I was homeschooled–now though this often has a very negative connotation in this case I would say the benefit was good. All of my subjects were literature based which means I was reading about 20 novels a semester (you gather a few words when you read that much). An interesting thing to note about these words is I bet you would recognize quite a few more if they were in the context of a sentence, on their own they seem a bit daunting. Also, it was strange to see so many scientific words. Just for the record this is my favorite word to say…soliloquy(and it was on the list!) Well that’s my two-cents.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Well I knew only about half of the left side, but I knew the majority of the ones on the right. I consider myself well above average intelligence and have read many books and I believe some of the words were new to me.
May 30th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
I might not know all the words on that list, but I did know exactly what a ziggurat is and I personally think that’s a little ridiculous.I wish I remembered my ATM code! Honestly though, I think some of those words are RANDOM… I mean really… a parabola… how often in the real world do we have to solve math equations involving parabolas? How about throw some of those adults into a high school math class and see if they can solve an equation for a parabola? or more importantly, are their checkbooks balanced? haha…I think that’s more important for today’s society’s than being able to define some vocabulary words which might appear in some “worth reading” literature.
May 31st, 2007 at 12:57 am
The site says “If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language.” I think the word “superior” is key here. There will always be people who are superior language users. Then there are people use are normal and satisfactory language users. There are also people who are specialist in some jargon, like technology, management, medical jargon. It all depends on the context of use. I wouls say don’t worry, and they are just trying to sell more of their product.