Your Beauty Is Exceeded Only By Your Acumen

WORD COUNT: 37,030

I almost did it Thursday. I almost got out of Main Street Books' used books section where there's a panoply of really good reading and I say I won't buy something yet I most often end up doing so. Saw this just as I was headed down the stairs, a copy of 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know (ISBN 0618374124) from the editors of the American Heritage dictionaries, 2003 edition. I have some cool stories behind these words … well, I think they are. The title of today's message, the first time I recall seeing acumen (defined here as “quickness and keenness of judgment or insight”) was as said by Doctor Doom to Morgana Le Fay in Iron Man #150, cover dated September 1981.

Of course, for years as a result of the same panel I thought elucidate was actually a proper name as Morgana – better known in Arthurian lore and nearly every other Marvel comic I've read with her in it as Morgan Le Fay, but I digress – was facing her pet raven as she trilled, “Pray, elucidate.” Anyway, the book was published the year Martha and I married each other, and as I went through the book I thought MAN, do we require more of our graduates now than we did when I graduated high school in terms of vocabulary. And some really specialized stuff too. But judge for yourself; I doubt I'll get into trouble with the publisher for listing just the words without elaborating on them (though could you?)

Abjure, abrogate, abstemious, acumen, antebellum, auspicious, belie, bellicose, bowdlerize, chicanery, chromosome, churlish, circumlocution, circumnavigate, deciduous, deleterious, diffident, enervate, enfranchise, epiphany, equinox, euro (or Euro), evanescent, expurgate, facetious, fatuous, feckless, fiduciary, filibuster, gamete, gauche, gerrymander, hegemony, hemoglobin, homogeneous, hubris, hypotenuse, impeach, incognito, incontrovertible, inculcate, infrastructure, interpolate, irony, jejune, kinetic, kowtow, laissez faire (also laisser faire), lexicon, loquacious,

lugubrious, metamorphosis, mitosis, moiety, nanotechnology, nihilism, nomenclature, nonsectarian, notarize, obsequious, oligarchy, omnipotent, orthography, oxidize, parabola, paradigm, parameter (which I admit I confused with “perimeter”), pecuniary, photosynthesis, plagiarize, plasma (also plasm), polymer, precipitous, quasar, quotidian, recapitulate, reciprocal, reparation, respiration, sanguine, soliloquy, subjugate, suffragist, supercilious, tautology, taxonomy, tectonic, tempestuous, thermodynamics, totalitarian, unctuous, usurp, vacuous, vehement, vortex, winnow, wrought, xenophobe, yeoman, AND ziggurat.

And now as I approach the last week of National Novel Writing Month, over the weekend we also got blessed with new snow clothes (gloves, pants, and boots) for Sarah and Jeffrey and some much needed rest – let's be blunt, I needed because for a while I forgot this weekend what day it was! The community of Minot through Feed My Starving Children put together more than 400,000 meals for people recovering in the Philippines from the recent typhoon, got to see our kids being supremely entertaining with singing and dancing (better than I remember being at their age, to be quite honest) and really, end-of-year holidays hardly ever bother me anymore.

Write on, David