VOCABULARY FOR OCTOBER 28

THIS WEEK IS A BIT DIFFERENT...I WOULD LIKE YOU TO LEARN THE FOLLOWING TONE WORDS:

A SELECTION OF TONE WORDS

Positive tone/attitude: lighthearted, hopeful, enthusiastic, confident, optimistic, loving, passionate, amused, elated, sentimental, sympathetic, compassionate, proud

Negative tone/attitude: angry, disgusted, outraged, accusing, inflammatory, irritated,
indignant, threatening

Irony/Sarcasm: sarcastic, cynical, critical, facetious, patronizing, satiric, mock-heroic, irreverent, mock-serious, taunting, ironic, flippant

Sorrow/Fear/Worry: somber, elegiac, gloomy, melancholic, disturbed, mournful, solemn,
serious, apprehensive, concerned, hopeless, resigned

General/Organizational: formal, objective, nostalgic, ceremonial, candid, shocked,
reminiscent, restrained, clinical, baffled, sentimental, detached,
objective, questioning, urgent, instructive, matter-of-fact, learned,
factual, didactic, informative, authoritative

VOCABULARY FOR OCTOBER 21

INVECTIVE – an emotionally violent, verbal denunciation or attack using strong, abusive language. (For example, in Henry IV, Part I, Prince Hal calls the large character of Falstaff “this sanguine coward, this bedpresser, this horseback breaker, this huge
hill of flesh.”)

SYNESTHESIA – when one kind of sensory stimulus evokes the subjective experience of another. Ex: The sight of red ants makes you itchy. In literature, synesthesia refers to the practice of associating two or more different senses in the same image.
Red Hot Chili Peppers’ song title,“Taste the Pain,” is an example.

HYPOPHORA – Figure of reasoning in which one or more questions is/are asked and then answered, often at length, by one and the same speaker; raising and responding to one’s own question(s). A common usage is to ask the question at the beginning of a paragraph and then use the paragraph to answer it. You can use hypophora to raise questions which you think the reader obviously has on his/her mind and would like to see formulated and answered.
Ex. “When the enemy struck on that June day of 1950, what did America do? It did what it always has done in all its times of peril. It appealed to the heroism of its youth.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

SIMPLE SENTENCE: A simple sentence, also called an independent clause, contains a subject and a verb, and it expresses a complete thought. EXAMPLE: Julio goes to the library and studies every day.

COMPLEX SENTENCE: A sentence with one independent clause and at least one dependent clause. EXAMPLE: The basketball players got on the bus because they had a game in Campinas.

COMPOUND SENTENCE: A sentence with two or more principal clauses and one or more subordinate clauses. EXAMPLE: Michelle speaks Spanish, and Jenny speaks Korean.

COMPOUND-COMPLEX SENTENCE: A sentence with two or more principal clauses and one or more subordinate clauses. EXAMPLE: Although we all love weekends, they go by too fast and they take too long to come again.

NO NEW VOCABULARY FOR THIS WEEK!

VOCABULARY FOR OCTOBER 7

EPISTROPHE (also called EPIPHORA and sometimes ANTISTROPHE)
A rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase at the end of successive clauses. Contrast with anaphora.
Examples:
“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us." —Emerson

Hourly joys be still upon you!
Juno sings her blessings on you. [. . .]
Scarcity and want shall shun you,
Ceres' blessing so is on you.
— Shakespeare, The Tempest (4.1.108-109; 116-17)

“We are born to sorrow, pass our time in sorrow, end our days in sorrow.”

EXPLETIVE: (Means "Filler")
In English syntax, expletive is the term used to describe syllables, words, or phrases that "fill a vacancy" without adding meaning to a text.

While expletives have a place in acceptable syntax, overuse of expletives damages texts by weakening and de-emphasizing the points being made. In technical writing, the most overused expletives are "there" and "it", as shown in the examples that follow. The recast version of each sentence immediately follows the weaker attempt.

Weak: There are significant trade-offs to be made between runtime performance and data security.

Recast: The contention between runtime performance and data security requires significant trade-offs.

Weak: It is my experience that Product X outperforms Product Y in a "live" environment.

Recast: In my experience, Product X outperforms Product Y in a "live" environment.


PEDANTIC:
Pedantic is an adjective that describes words, phrases, or a general tone that is overly scholarly, academic, or bookish (language that might be described as bombastic – using big words for the sake of using big words). Such language can be a put-off for readers.
EXAMPLE OF PEDANTIC LANGUAGE:
In Walden, Thoreau states that “The student who secures his coveted leisure and retirement by systematically shirking any labor necessary to man obtains but an ignoble and unprofitable leisure, defrauding himself of the experience which alone can
make leisure fruitful.”
Which is to say . . . If you coast through life avoiding work, you cannot appreciate the value of leisure. Thoreau goes on to say that work isn’t just physical labor; it’s intellectual labor. What good
does it do to study economics while you continue to spend your parents’ money, perhaps beyond what they can afford? Make your own money to know its value and to apply your intellectual work from the study of economics.

PREDICATE ADJECTIVE:
One type of subject complement-an adjective, group of adjectives, or adjective clause that follows a linking verb. It is in the predicate of the sentence, and modifies or describes the subject. For example, in the sentence "My boyfriend is tall, dark, and handsome," the group of predicate adjectives ("tall, dark, and handsome") describes "boyfriend."

PREDICATE NOMINATIVE:
A second type of subject complement-a noun, group of nouns, or noun clause that renames the subject. It, like the predicate adjective, follows a linking verb and is located in the predicate of the sentence. For example, in the sentence "Abe Lincoln was a man of integrity," the predicate nominative is "man of integrity," as it renames Abe Lincoln. Occasionally, this term or the term "predicate adjective" appears in a multiple-choice question.

RHETORICAL MODES:
This flexible term describes the variety, the conventions, and the purposes of the major kinds of writing. Sometimes referred to as modes of discourse. The rhetorical modes are what we are studying with each chapter: Narration, Description, Division and Classification, Comparison and Contrast, Process, Cause and Effect, Definition, and Argument and Persuasion

EPIZEUXIS (also called DIACOPE)-- Uninterrupted repetition, or repetition with
only one or two words between each repeated phrase. Poe might cry out, “Oh,
horror, horror, horror!”

VOCABULARY FOR SEPTEMBER 30

METONYMY: (me-ton'-y-my) from meta, "change" and onoma, "name"
The misnamer, change of noun or name, transmutation of a word; Reference to something or someone by naming one of its attributes.
Examples:
-The pen is mightier than the sword (The pen is an attribute of thoughts that are written with a pen; the sword is an attribute of military action)
-We await word from the crown.
-The IRS is auditing me? Great. All I need is a couple of suits arriving at my door.

BEGGING THE QUESTION: (can't prove major premise) Also Known as: Circular Reasoning, Reasoning in a Circle, Petitio Principii.
Begging the question, i.e., pretending the opponent already agrees with something that is required for the point being made, though this point is supposed to be evidence for the first thing = like reasoning in a circle. "Every assertion of value," because it presupposes beliefs, would seem like petitio principii even within its own system--but it is more useful to save the term for when those assertions of value are utilized in discussion with an opponent. In other words petitio principii only occurs in an ad hominem discussion (i.e., in trying to persuade an opponent or audience).
-Begging the Question is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true. This sort of "reasoning" typically has the following form. (The situation that results when a writer or speaker constructs an argument on an assumption that the audience does not accept.)
Ex: This painting is horrible because it is obviously worthless.
1. Premises in which the truth of the conclusion is claimed or the truth of the conclusion is assumed (either directly or indirectly).
2. Claim C (the conclusion) is true.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because simply assuming that the conclusion is true (directly or indirectly) in the premises does not constitute evidence for that conclusion. Obviously, simply assuming a claim is true does not serve as evidence for that claim. This is especially clear in particularly blatant cases: "X is true. The evidence for this claim is that X is true."
Some cases of question begging are fairly blatant, while others can be extremely subtle.
Examples of Begging the Question
Interviewer: "Your resume looks impressive but I need another reference."
Bill: "Jill can give me a good reference."
Interviewer: "Good. But how do I know that Jill is trustworthy?"
Bill: "Certainly. I can vouch for her.

ASYNDETON- The omission of conjunctions between related clauses.
Ex: "This is the villain among you who deceived you, who cheated you, who meant to betray you completely." (Aristotle)

POLYSYNDETON- Repetition of conjunctions in close succession.
Ex: "We have ships and men and money and stores."

SYLLOGISM- Logical reasoning from inarguable premises.
Ex: All mortals die. All humans are mortal. All humans die.
ENTHYMEME- Logical reasoning with one premise left unstated.
Ex: We cannot trust this man, for he has perjured himself in the past. (Missing: Those who perjure themselves cannot be trusted.)

VOCABULARY FOR SEPTEMBER 23

SLIPPERY SLOPE: The Slippery Slope is a fallacy in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any argument for the inevitability of the event in question. In most cases, there are a series of steps or gradations between one event and the one in question and no reason is given as to why the intervening steps or gradations will simply be bypassed. This "argument" has the following form:

1. Event X has occurred (or will or might occur).
2. Therefore event Y will inevitably happen.

This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because there is no reason to believe that one event must inevitably follow from another without an argument for such a claim. This is especially clear in cases in which there is a significant number of steps or gradations between one event and another.

Example: "You can never give anyone a break. If you do, they'll walk all over you."

STRAW MAN FALLACY: The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position. This sort of "reasoning" has the following pattern:
1. Person A has position X.
2. Person B presents position Y (which is a distorted version of X).
3. Person B attacks position Y.
4. Therefore X is false/incorrect/flawed.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because attacking a distorted version of a position simply does not constitute an attack on the position itself. One might as well expect an attack on a poor drawing of a person to hurt the person.
Example of Straw Man:
Bill and Jill are arguing about cleaning out their closets:
Jill: "We should clean out the closets. They are getting a bit messy."
Bill: "Why, we just went through those closets last year. Do we have to clean them out everyday?"
Jill: "I never said anything about cleaning them out every day. You just want too keep all your junk forever, which is just ridiculous."

ANTITHESIS: From the Greek, "opposition"
A rhetorical term for the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases or clauses. Plural: antitheses. Adjective: antithetical.
Example of Antithesis:
"Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."
(advertising slogan)

KAIROS: The opportune occasion for speech. The term kairos has a rich and varied history, but generally refers to the way a given context for communication both calls for and constrains one's speech. Thus, sensitive to kairos, a speaker or writer takes into account the contingencies of a given place and time, and considers the opportunities within this specific context for words to be effective and appropriate to that moment.

VOCABULARY FOR SEPTEMBER 16

NON SEQUITUR-fallacy in which claims, reasons, or warrants fail to connect logically; one point doesn't follow from another. If you're really my friend, you'll lend me five hundred dollars.

CACOPHONY (cack-AH-fuh-nee or cack-AW-fuh-nee)
Discordant sounds in the jarring juxtaposition of harsh letters or syllables which are grating to the ear, usually inadvertent, but sometimes deliberately used in poetry for effect.

Sidelight: Sound devices are important to poetry. To create sounds appropriate to the content, the poet may sometimes prefer to achieve a cacophonous effect instead of the more commonly sought-for euphony. The use of words with the consonants b, k and p, to cite one example, produce harsher sounds than the soft f and v or the liquid l, m and n.

EUPHONY (YOO-fuh-nee)
Harmony or beauty of sound which provides a pleasing effect to the ear, usually sought-for in poetry for effect. It is achieved not only by the selection of individual word-sounds, but also by their arrangement in the repetition, proximity, and flow of sound patterns.

Sidelight: The consonants considered most pleasing in sound are l, m, n, r, v, and w. The harsher consonants in euphonious texts become less jarring when in the proximity of softer sounds. Vowel sounds are generally more euphonious than the consonants, so a line with a higher ratio of vowel sounds will produce a more agreeable effect; also, the long vowels in words like moon and fate are more melodious than the short vowels in cat and bed. But the most important measure of euphonic strategies is their appropriateness to the subject.

BANDWAGON APPEAL – the belief that something should be done because the majority of people do it (or wish to do it).
Ad populum is the original Latin term, meaning “to the people,” suggesting that a person yields his opinion to the will of the public majority rather than to logic. Bandwagon appeals are arguments that urge people to follow the same paths that others do. In old-time political campaigns, politicians used to travel literally on horse-drawn bandwagons, urging citizens to “jump on the bandwagon” — or join the crowd — to vote for them.
People can be like sheep, and most of us can be attracted to strong, charismatic leaders who make us feel wanted or important. Although Americans like to think of themselves as “rugged individuals,” we are often easily seduced by ideas endorsed by popular culture and the mass media that prey upon our desires to belong to a herd.
-- Peer pressure is a type of bandwagon appeal – you may do something that others are doing simply because others are doing it. “Because everyone else does it” is a favorite reason cited by young teens who are looking for reasons to do something more grown up.
EXAMPLE
Radio Ad: “Zippo – the grand old lighter that’s made right here in the good old U.S. of A.”
This ad implies that Zippo brand cigarette lighters are the American standard, like Marlboro and the Dallas Cowboys (dubbed “America’s Team”). The Zippo company’s warrant is this: If everyone else is buying this brand, then we all should too. Logic, however, tells us that we need a better reason than peer pressure or popularity.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: Cognitive Dissonance Theory argues that the experience of dissonance (or incompatible beliefs and actions) is adversive and people are highly motivated to avoid it. In their efforts to avoid feelings of dissonance, people will avoid hearing views that oppose their own, change their beliefs to match their actions, and seek reassurance after making a difficult decision.

Example: Cognitive dissonance is what the mainly Democratic audience of journalists experienced at the White House correspondents' dinner on April 30, 2005, when a supposedly straightlaced Republican first lady made suggestive wisecracks about her husband. "For the mainly Democratic audience - this was a crowd of Washington journalists and luminaries from Hollywood and Manhattan - it was an evening of cognitive dissonance. How to reconcile this charming image on stage with the Bush they love to bash?"

OXYMORON – a combination of contradictory or incongruous words (“cruel to be kind”)

RED HERRING – the logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but which proves or supports a different proposition than the one it is purporting to prove or support. This phrase is thought to have originated from the use of smoked herring fish to distract dogs following a scent trail. The herring’s strong smell could obscure the real trail and lay a false one.

VOCABULARY FOR SEPTMEBER 2

SYNECDOCHE: understanding one thing with another; the use of a part for the whole, or the whole for the part. (A form of metonymy.)
Examples:
*Give us this day our daily bread. Matthew 6
*I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
HYPERBATON: Hyperbaton is a figure of speech in which words that naturally belong together are separated from each other for emphasis or effect. This kind of unnatural or rhetorical separation is possible to a much greater degree in highly inflected languages, where sentence meaning does not depend closely on word order. In Latin and Ancient Greek, the effect of hyperbaton is usually to emphasize the first word. It has been called "perhaps the most distinctively alien feature of Latin word order."[1]
Example: "Object there was none. Passion there was none." - Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart.
PERIPHRASIS (or more commonly circumlocution): is what you do when you're 'beating around the bush'. It is a way of speaking or writing all around a topic without getting to the point. It's where you use fifteen words when just one or two would do.
ANAPHORA: the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses or lines.
*We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender. Churchill.
PLEONASM: use of superfluous or redundant words, often enriching the thought.
*No one, rich or poor, will be excepted.
*Ears pierced while you wait!
*I have seen no stranger sight since I was born.
PERIODIC SENTENCE: a stylistic device employed at the sentence level, characterized as a sentence that is not grammatically complete until the final clause or phrase. According to William Harmon, the periodic sentence is used "to arouse interest and curiosity, to hold an idea in suspense before its final revelation."[3] In the words of William Minto, "the effect...is to keep the mind in a state of uniform or increasing tension until the dénouement."[8]
Example:
Longfellow’s "Snowflakes":[3]
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garment shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent and soft, and slow,
Descends the snow.
LOOSE SENTENCE: a type of sentence in which the main idea (independent clause) comes first, followed by dependent grammatical units such as phrases and clauses. The meaning of a loose sentence can be easily understood in the very beginning of the sentence, unlike a periodic sentence where the subject-verb of the base sentence is completed at the end.
Example: He went into town to buy groceries, visit his friends and go to the bookstore.
AD HOMINEM :a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument. Typically, this fallacy involves two steps. First, an attack against the character of person making the claim, her circumstances, or her actions is made (or the character, circumstances, or actions of the person reporting the claim). Second, this attack is taken to be evidence against the claim or argument the person in question is making (or presenting).
Examples:
*Leni Riefenstahl was a Nazi, so her film The Triumph of the Will is devoid of merit.

VOCABULARY FOR AUGUST 26

AMBIGUITY - A statement with two or more meanings that may seem to exclude one another in the context. Ex: “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know!”
There are two types of ambiguity, lexical and structural.
LEXICAL AMBIGUITY - is by far the more common. Everyday examples include nouns like 'chip', 'pen' and 'suit', verbs like 'call', 'draw,' ‘shot’ and 'run', and adjectives like 'deep', 'dry' and 'hard'. There are various tests for ambiguity. One test is having two unrelated antonyms, as with 'hard', which has both 'soft' and 'easy' as opposites.
STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY occurs when a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure, such as the phrases 'Tibetan history teacher' and 'short men and women', and the sentences 'The girl hit the boy with a book' and 'Visiting relatives can be boring'. These ambiguities are said to be structural because each such phrase can be represented in two structurally different ways, e.g., '[Tibetan history] teacher' and 'Tibetan [history teacher].'
DEDUCTIVE – Deductive reasoning works from the more general to the more specific. Sometimes this is informally called a "top-down" approach. We might begin with thinking up a theory about our topic of interest. We then narrow that down into more specific hypotheses that we can test. We narrow down even further when we collect observations to address the hypotheses. This ultimately leads us to be able to test the hypotheses with specific data -- a confirmation (or not) of our original theories.
INDUCTIVE - Inductive reasoning works the other way, moving from specific observations to broader generalizations and theories. Informally, we sometimes call this a "bottom up" approach (please note that it's "bottom up" and not "bottoms up" which is the kind of thing the bartender says to customers when he's trying to close for the night!). In inductive reasoning, we begin with specific observations and measures, begin to detect patterns and regularities, formulate some tentative hypotheses that we can explore, and finally end up developing some general conclusions or theories.
ANTECEDENT – The word, phrase, or clause referred to by a pronoun. The AP language exam occasionally asks for the antecedent of a given pronoun in a long, complex sentence or in a group of sentences. A question from the 2001 AP test as an example follows:
“But it is the grandeur of all truth which can occupy a very high place in human interests that it is never absolutely novel to the meanest of minds; it exists eternally, by way of germ of latent principle, in the lowest as in the highest, needing to be developed but never to be planted.” The antecedent of “it” (bolded) is...? [answer: “all truth”]
CHIASMUS - Repetition of ideas in inverted order. Example: "I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." (David Foster Wallace)
PARALLELISM- Also referred to as parallel construction or parallel structure, this term comes from Greek roots meaning “beside one another.” It refers to the grammatical or rhetorical framing of words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs to give structural similarity. This can involve, but is not limited to, repetition of a grammatical element such as a preposition or verbal phrase. (Again, the opening of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities is an example: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of believe, it was the epoch of incredulity....”) The effects of parallelism are numerous, but frequently they act as an organizing force to attract the reader’s attention, add emphasis and organization, or simply provide a musical rhythm.
LITOTE- (pronounced almost like “little tee”) – a form of understatement that involves making an affirmative point by denying its opposite. Litote is the opposite of hyperbole. Examples: “Not a bad idea,” “Not many,” “It isn’t very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain” (Salinger, Catcher in the Rye).
ZEUGMA - When a word is used with two adjacent words in the same construction, but only makes literal sense with one of them. Example: "He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men."
(Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried)
ELLIPSIS - Omission of one or more words, which must be supplied by the listener or reader.
-"True stories deal with hunger, imaginary ones with love." (Raymond Queneau)
-"Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn't know who or what he was . . . with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do . . . he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosityof his hands." (Toni Morrison, Sula)

VOCABULARY FOR AUGUST 19

IRONY: expression of something which is contrary to the intended meaning; the words say one thing but mean another.
*Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man. Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
PARADOX: an assertion seemingly opposed to common sense, but that may yet have some truth in it.
*What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young. George Bernard Shaw
CLICHE: A trite expression--often a figure of speech whose effectiveness has been worn out through overuse and excessive familiarity.
[Fr. "a stereotype plate"]
-"Live and learn."
-"What goes around comes around."
EUPHEMISM: Substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit.
[Gk. "use of good words"]
-"Fertilizer" for "manure"
-"Ground beef" for "ground flesh of a dead cow"
DICTION: etymology: speaking; style (from dicere, to say)definition: "The use of words in oral or written discourse" (Holman and Harmon); choice of words.
SYNTAX: etymology: to arrange together (syn + tassein --which is also the root of "tactics
definition: the order or arrangement of words in a sentence.
METAPHOR: implied comparison achieved through a figurative use of words; the word is used not in its literal sense, but in one analogous to it.
*Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage. Shakespeare, Macbeth
SIMILE: an explicit comparison between two things using 'like' or 'as'.
*My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease, Shakespeare, Sonnet CXLVII
*Reason is to faith as the eye to the telescope. D. Hume [?]
ARCHAIC: ancient, old-fashioned
Her ARCHAIC computer could not handle the latest software.
ENGENDER: to produce, cause, or bring about
Laura's fear of dogs was ENGENDERED at age six, when she was bitten by one.