12/9/03
A WORD IN THE NEWS CLICKS TO A COOL CONNECTION
Most of you probably read that Bill Gates and his wife were recently visiting a malaria clinic in Manhica, Mozambique. While there, the couple announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would finance a large grant to accelerate research into malaria, a disease that kills more than a hundred million people each year, many of them young African children.
As I mentioned when I wrote about the new meaning (for me) about cascade when it was used in the explanation of the recent widespread blackout in the Northeast, I often learn a new meaning from the news for an old word. Malaria isn’t exactly one of those, but it did get me thinking about it and its origins. Lesson 10 in Volume I presents many words based on the Latin root word “mal,” meaning bad, evil, ill. To me, when I was writing the text for that lesson, malaria stood out from malady, malaise, malapropism, malcontent, malevolent and so on, so I called it a Cool Connection®.
Malaria comes from Latin mala aria, meaning bad or evil air. Twenty-five centuries ago, Romans made the connection that the illness caused by this “air” came from the swamps. They weren’t actually far off, because, as we now know, malaria is carried by mosquitoes which, indeed, do come from wet areas such as swamps.
The more I developed Word Web Vocabulary’s lessons, the more Cool Connections I perceived. If you finished Volume I last year, I hope you remember Antarctic, bisquit and dandelion — just three of the special connections out of the twenty-five that occur in the 36 lessons. Antarctic is related to the prefix “anti-,” meaning opposite. We understand this when applied to antacid, antibiotic, antidote, antilock brakes, etc., but did any of you immediately realize Antarctic means the opposite arctic, as in the South Pole is the opposite of the arctic region at the North Pole? I certainly didn’t until I read it in a dictionary!
Biscuit (twice + cooked) was a real eye opener, too. I hadn’t known that the original biscuits were twice baked, as are today’s biscotti. Dandelion is a dandy Cool Connection, a standout among the words whose origins come from the Latin root dent or dont, meaning tooth. Dandelion is an English corruption of the French dent de lion or tooth of the lion, because of the outline of the teeth-like leaves.
I hope you agree with me that words like these make learning language a whole lot of fun — for you and your students!
Won’t you please share your Word Web experiences or questions with me at emiller@seepub.com? I look forward to hearing from you.
Elinor
WORD WEB VOCABULARY: moving vocabulary from the
edge of the curriculum to its center
