Posted by Andrew Simone at 11:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Are these words important? You be deciduous!
Mr. Kottke linked to the new book 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know with the sneer, "Alternate title: 100 mostly useless words."

Here's the complete list.

I would never buy this book in a million years, but that's not because I think these words are "mostly useless." Some of them, though, you'd have to have been totally playing hooky to get through high school without, no? For example,

chromosome
circumnavigate
deciduous
equinox
gerrymander
hypotenuse
impeach
kinetic
laissez faire
photosynthesis
respiration
suffragist

And others, though perhaps not as widely used as they should be, are very far from useless, or even uncommon. It's quicker to pick out the words I don't use or often read than to list the ones I do, but I can't imagine doing without these:

auspicious
facetious
feckless
homogeneous
impeach
incognito
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
lugubrious
metamorphosis
obsequious
omnipotent
plagiarize
precipitous
reciprocal
subjugate
tempestuous
totalitarian
usurp
vehement

Interesting. Post a comment?