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VERBAL ADVANTAGE
word power. If you want to learn more words, then you should read more and
study words in context; at the same time, however, when you come across a
word you don't know, or a word you think you know, it's essential that you <
make the effort to look it up in a dictionary, because the context can often be
misleading or ambiguous.
To illustrate that point, I like to relate an anecdote about a woman—the
mother of a teenager—who came to one of the author signings for my book
Tooth and Nail, a vocabulary-building mystery novel designed to teach high
school students the words they need to know for the Scholastic Assessment
Test (SAT).
"I think your idea of teaching vocabulary in the context of a story is great,"
the woman told me. "I can almost always figure out what a word means from
context, and I hardly ever need to use a dictionary."
Whenever people assert that they can guess what a word means or that
they rarely need to use a dictionary, I see a big red flag with the words "verbally
disadvantaged" on it.
I looked at the woman and said, "I always encourage people to check the
dictionary definition of a word, even if it's a word they think they know. It's not
always so easy to guess what a word means from context, because the context doesn't always reveal the meaning. May I give you an example?"
"Sure," the woman said, confident of her ability to guess what words mean
and unaware of my devilish plot to expose that practice as a fallacy.
"All right," I said. "I'll give you a word in the context of a complete sentence, and you tell me what the word means. Here's the sentence: 'After her
exciting night on the town, she felt enervated.' Can you tell me what enervated
means?"
The woman frowned, realizing that she had volunteered to go wading in
verbal quicksand. "Dm, well, I guess if her night on the town was exciting, she
must have felt stimulated, or keyed-up, or maybe energized. Is that what enervated means?"
Coldhearted inquisitor and unflinching defender of the language that I am,
I told her the truth. Because enervate sounds like energize, many people are
tempted to think the words are synonymous when in fact they are antonyms.
From my sample sentence, "After her exciting night on the town, she felt enervated," if you don't know precisely what enervated means there's no way youl
can guess because the context is ambiguous—it's vague and capable of being
interpreted in more than one way.
The point is, as I've said several times before in this program, if you want
to build a large and exact vocabulary, don't rely only on context or on your in-J
tuition or on someone else's definition of a word. When you have even a shred
of doubt about a word, look it up. It won't cost you anything to do that, and no
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one's going to peer over your shoulder and say, "Hey, what's the matter, stupid? You don't know what enervated means?" On the other hand, someone
might say "Whoa, get a load of Verbal Advantage-head digging through the
dictionary again."
If something like that should ever happen, you can throw the book at the
person—literally—but why ruin a good dictionary? Instead, you can rest easy
in the knowledge that the insolent dullard already is eating your intellectual
dust—for you, as a verbally advantaged person, know that reading, consulting
a dictionary, and studying this book will invigorate, not enervate, your mind.
To enervate means to weaken, drain of energy, deprive of force or vigor.
The corresponding adjective is enervated, lacking energy, drained of vitality or
strength.
Word 45: LEVITY (LEV-i-tee)
Lightness or gaiety of manner or expression; specifically, a lightness or lack of
seriousness that is inappropriate or unbecoming.
Levity comes from the Latin levitas, lightness, which in turn comes from
levis, light, the source also of the familiar words levitate and levitation. Levity
occasionally is used literally to mean buoyancy, the state or quality of having little weight, and it is also sometimes used to mean inconstancy, fickleness, or
flightiness. In current usage, however, levity most often denotes a figurative
lack of gravity, a lightness or lack of seriousness unsuitable to the occasion.
Synonyms of levity in this most common sense include silliness, foolishness, frivolity (fri-VAHL-i-tee), flippancy (FLIP-'n-see), tomfoolery, triviality, and
jocularity (JAHK-yoo-LAR-i-tee). Antonyms include seriousness, earnestness,
sobriety, solemnity (suh-LEM-ni-tee), and gravity.
When you are trying to fix a word in your mind and make it a permanent
part of your vocabulary, it helps if you can associate it with a vivid image or experience. The experience I associate with the word levity occurred way back in
high school, which in° my case was a small coeducational boarding school in
western Massachussetts.
One night in the dormitory some friends and I were up late, several hours
• : after "bedcheck," our prepschool term for "lights-out time." We were shooting
the breeze, laughing and joking, being loud and boisterous, and generally behaving in a puerile manner, when suddenly the door flew open and one of the
English teachers stepped into the room.
Instantly, we all shut up. In the lohg moment of silence that followed, the
teacher looked at each of us like Clint Eastwood trying to decide whether
some deadbeat has enough brains to pack his lunch. Finally he spoke. "This is
no time for levity," he growled. "Go to your rooms and go to bed."