Monday, December 1, 2008

Favorite Word?

I really want to win the 20 volume OED from Powell's, but I am not sure I can answer the question:

"What's your favorite word? And why? What, in your opinion, is the strangest, or most useful, or ridiculously specific word in all of the English language?" (sic, right? awk, at least)

There's too many good words.

Oh, Elissa, that was a dumb statement. But true.

I know I just have to pick one, and defend it. But how do you pick?

I was thinking of having my students do this, but 1) I think it's too meta for them, and 2) I don't know if ANY of them would actually want an OED. They'd be excited about how much it was worth, but... yeah. Though if I could get some of them to write about a word with the dangling carrot being any kind of prize worth $895, so be it. We'll see.

1 comment:

Megan Savage said...

i asked a student in class the other day whether he'd written anything on the prompt the students were working on in class. his response? "i'm still trying to work out what 'miasmic' means." note that miasmic had not come up in class at all. :)