febrile -
1. Having or showing the symptoms of a fever.
2. Having or showing a great deal of nervous excitement or energy. I doubt I'll need the word - Do I even know anyone with a great deal of nervous excitement or energy? Maybe years ago, but we're all older now, subdued rather than mellow.
Then, in Michael Gorra's review of "When We Were Orphans" by Kazuo Ishiguro (NY Times Sunday Book Review, September 24, 2000) I came across a word with relevance to life as I think I know it.
Englishness -- in fact, human interaction of all kinds -- will remain for him a form of learned behavior, in which he compounds the simulacrum of a character from both the gestures of the people around him and his reading in ''The Wind in the Willows'' or Sherlock Holmes.simulacrum -
1. an image or likeness.
2. a mere image or one that does not represent the reality of the original.
Is online education as practiced by some of the instructors anything like a real education? I think of the Comp Sci students rolling their eyes describing one of their courses as watching PowerPoint on the web. Definitely not the challenging exchange of ideas promised by the school's bulletin. Paraphrasing a quote from "Good Will Hunting" might be applicable here: an education you could have gotten for a $1.50 in late charges at the public library2. a mere image or one that does not represent the reality of the original.
And, pardon my riff, the ability to take a Computer Architecture course on youtube with Anshul Kumar, Department of Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Delhi might suggest that the quote should be updated to reference internet charges. While the majority of youtube viewers prefer watching dogs and cats doing tricks to lectures in English with an Indian accent, I find this stuff mesmerizing.
(Of special fascination was a reversal of labels in a slide about Big and Small Endian memory organization. I thought that a flub like that would be fixed in post production unless they wanted to convey an authentic experience of a professorial stumble. A classic academic joke has a prof in one of the hard sciences saying that the proof or derivation of an equation is obvious. When a student has the temerity to ask to see the proof the instructor starts, then stops, stares at the board for a while before rushing from the room, returning many minutes later with notes, continuing, "Like I said, it's obvious." Then, reading from his notes, the prof completes the problem.)
I saw the next two words in Kathleen McElroy's article, "A Little Rusty?" about adults preparing for standardized grad school tests.
esurient
1. Hungry; greedy.
I don't believe I ever saw this word before. She, as well as other journalists scored surprisingly low on essays because she "hadn’t incorporated G.R.E. vocabulary favorites like “esurient” and “vitiate. Esurient was dictionary.com's Word of the Day on October 05, 2009 which must give it some sort of cache, but why would anyone use the word except to score points. (Duh, this is an exam chucklehead.)
It's not much different than years ago when I was advised that worming agape, amity, and ennui into an essay would increase the grade on and essay half a grade point. Tough to do in most chemistry and physics reports, although it might work in biochemistry. (There is the well-known "greedy algorithm" in Huffman compression, but the formal name the greedy algorithm. The profs I know would probably be miffed to look up esurient to find that it means greed .
vitiate
1. to impair the quality of; make faulty; spoil.
2. to impair or weaken the effectiveness of.
3. to debase; corrupt; pervert.
4. to make legally defective or invalid; invalidate: to vitiate a claim.
Now here's a word to conjure with! I'd guess that most people outside the legal profession would assume some relationship with vital or vivacious giving the cognoscenti the ability to insult people to their face. (This assumes, of course, that people are too lazy or embarrassed to look up or ask about a word they don't understand.)
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