Vocabulary Building Quotes

All of us possess a reading vocabulary as big as a lake but draw from a writing vocabulary as small as a pond. The good news is that the acts of searching and gathering always expand the number of usable words.

Vocabulary words are the building blocks of the internal learning structure. Vocabulary is also the tool to better define a problem, seek more accurate solutions, etc.

Today for show & tell, I've brought in some flash cards I made. Each card has a letter followed by several dashes. When I show the card, you yell out the vulgar, obscene or blasphemous word they stand for! …Ready? …She's such a hypocrite about building vocabulary.

…I still have some respect. Respect for those who read. For those who snatch important time from their lives so as to construct a new one. Nothing is more powerful than reading; no one is a greater liar than he who holds that reading a book is a passive gesture…Reading is a dangerous act, because it gives shape and dimension to words, it incarnates and disperses them in all directions. It turns everything upside down and makes change and tickets and lint fall out of the pockets of the world…to know is the first step toward change. My respect goes to those people who don’t throw these stories away, who don’t neglect them, who make them their own. Those who feel the words on their skin, who carve them in their flesh, who build a new vocabulary – they are altering the direction of the world, because they have understood how to be in it.

Marked.” My face was on fire, my limbs shaking. “All of you. I will take all of you out with my own bare hands!” There was laughter building in Bram’s voice as he responded. “As cute as I’m sure that would be, your attempt…if we thought the people who might try to trace that chip could make you absolutely, one hundred percent safe, I would carry you to them and hand you over myself.” I gingerly rested my fingertips against my forehead, breathing deeply, trying to calm myself down. “There are some very bad men out to get you, Miss Dearly.” “You have got to be kidding me.” “By the way, you have quite the vocabulary, for a princess.” He still sounded amused. This statement was random enough to get my attention. “Princess?” I asked, confused. “You know, a princess. A New Victorian girl.” My lips parted to fire off another question before it clicked. “You’re a Punk.” “Born and bred.” “Fantastic.

Parent talk is probably the most valuable resource in our world. No matter the language, the culture, the nuances of vocabulary, or the socioeconomic status, language is the element that helps develop the brain to its optimum potential. In the same way, the lack of language is the enemy of brain development.

Never too late for vocabulary building,” he said.

When the reader has stopped to wonder at your delamificatious vocabulary, or, worse, when the reader has stopped because the word you've used has no more meaning to him than a random ptliijnbvc of letters, the reader is not involved in your story. ... Generally, saying 'edifice' instead of 'building' doesn't tell your reader anything about the building; it tells the reader that you know that word edifice.

Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name—that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody has his bête noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple—she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canapé, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.

[Cult] members learn a new vocabulary that is designed to constrict their thinking into absolute, black-and-white, thought-stopping clichés that conform to group ideology. (“Lock her up” and “Build the Wall” are Trumpian examples. Even his put-downs and nicknames—Crooked Hillary, Pocahontas for Elizabeth Warren—function to block other thoughts. Terms like “deep state” and “globalist” also act as triggers. They rouse emotion and direct attention.)

I will persist until I succeed. I was not delivered unto this world in defeat, nor does failure course in my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. I will hear not those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious. Let them join the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny. I will persist until I succeed. The prizes of life are at the end of each journey, not near the beginning; and it is not given to me to know how many steps are necessary in order to reach my goal. Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner. Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult. I will persist until I succeed. Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each blow, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today. I will be liken to the rain drop which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking. I will persist until I succeed. I will never consider defeat and I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are words of fools. I will avoid despair but if this disease of the mind should infect me then I will work on in despair. I will toil and I will endure. I will ignore the obstacles at my feet and keep mine eyes on the goals above my head, for I know that where dry desert ends, green grass grows. I will persist until I succeed. The Greatest Salesman in the World Og Mandino

Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing

You go on to the third level, of course, and begin to write real fiction. Why shouldn’t you? Why should you fear? Carpenters don’t build monsters, after all; they build houses, stores, and banks. They build some of wood a plank at a time and some of brick a brick at a time. You will build a paragraph at a time, constructing these of your vocabulary and your knowledge of grammar and basic style. As long as you stay level-on-the-level and shave even every door, you can build whatever you like—whole mansions, if you have the energy.

Be mindful of the words in your mind and in your mouth. Choose to use an affirming and positive vocabulary because your actions and outcomes will follow suit.

One cannot successfully express their ideas without having solid vocabulary skills.

and begin to write real fiction. Why shouldn’t you? Why should you fear? Carpenters don’t build monsters, after all; they build houses, stores, and banks. They build some of wood a plank at a time and some of brick a brick at a time. You will build a paragraph at a time, constructing these of your vocabulary and your knowledge of grammar and basic style. As long as you stay level-on-the-level and shave even every door, you can build whatever you like—whole mansions, if you have the energy.

All normal human beings are born with a powerful urge to learn. Almost all of them lose this urge, even before they have reached maturity. It is only the few … who are so constituted that lack of learning becomes a nuisance. This is perhaps the most insidious of human tragedies.

———————————— WHAT WE TEACH YOU How to address your lodge. How to give toasts. How to tell dialect stories. How to propose to a lady. How to entertain banquets. How to make convincing selling-talks. How to build big vocabulary. How to create a strong personality. How to become a rational, powerful and original thinker. How to be a MASTER MAN!

The things we love weave themselves into the framework of our being. They are the trellises on which our thoughts grow; we shape ourselves, our habits, our vocabularies, to accommodate them. If someone asks, “Why do you love this?” the question is as impossible to answer as “Why are you?” You cannot isolate the part of you that loves from the rest of you, or mark its beginning and ending. Old couples grow to look like each other. Old ruins blur into their ivy. Star Wars fans name their kids Luke and Leia and show up at conventions dressed as Jabba the Hutt. At first we loved the Millennium Falcon, so we wanted to build a scale replica in our basement. Now we love the Millennium Falcon because of the scale replica in our basement. Every time I watched Star Wars I used to hold my breath to see if it felt the same. But now I know it won’t. It hasn’t moved, but I have. It’s always there. It’s magic, still, but a different magic every time. I turn off all the lights in the house so there’s no reflection or glare, shut all the doors and windows, and settle in a chair with my arms folded over my knees and wait for takeoff.

No more peeping through keyholes! No more mas turbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible a la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible-it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, murder, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism, megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicide, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil, and the glory that is God. All brought into the open on a colossal scale, and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age. A classic purity, then-and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Rabelais rebuilds the walls of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human boneswhilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!

How on earth does lifeless matter become the building blocks for living things? How do neurons turn into minds? What should be the vocabulary used to describe the interactions between the brain and its mind? When humankind finds some answers, will we be disheartened by what they are? Will our future understanding of “consciousness” simply not be fulfilling? Will it be simple yet cold and harsh?

If we step back from the progressive argument and put it in any other context, its absurdity immediately becomes apparent. Imagine if I were to say to my daughter, who got a high score on the SAT, “You don’t deserve your scores at all. You didn’t build that. After all, young lady, you had teachers who helped you with vocabulary and math. Moreover, you took the public roads to the test. Had your car been held up along the way or caught fire, you would count on the services of the police and the fire department. So society deserves a large part of the credit for those scores. They don’t reflect your accomplishment but society’s accomplishment.” If I said this I am sure my daughter would think I was talking like an insane person. In fact, of course, I would be talking like a progressive.

I do know that the gardens of the first lands are still lying there, right under the skin of the world- pulsing the way our heartbeat drums under our own skin. And I believe that there's a connectedness between everything that gives some people a deep and abiding affinity to a certain kind of place or creature." "Like totems?" "Maybe. Or maybe something even more personal- something that's impossible to articulate with the vocabulary we have at the moment." "This is too weird." Annie shrugged. "What can I say? It's getting late, the stars are out. Once the sun sets, I tend to embrace whatever wild spirits are running around in the darkness, talking away to each other. I leave the logic of streets and pavement and cars and tall buildings behind and buy into the old magics that they're whispering about. Sometimes those little mysteries and bits of wisdom stick to the bones of my head and I carry them right out into the sunlight again. They're like Jack's stories, true and not true, all at the same time. They don't exactly shape my life, but they certainly colour it." She glanced at him, "I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is

A good writer is likely to know and use, or find out and use, the words for common architectural features, like "lintel," "newel post," "corbelling," "abutment," and the concrete or stone "hems" alongisde the steps leading up into churches or public buildings; the names of carpenters' or pumbers' tools, artists' materials, or whatever furniture, implements, or processes his characters work with; and the names of common household items, including those we do not usually hear named, often as we use them. Above all, the writer should stretch his vocabulary of ordinary words and idioms--words and idioms he sees all the time and knows how to use but never uses. I mean here not language that smells of the lamp but relatively common verbs, nouns, and adjectives. The serious-mined way to vocabulary is to read through a dictionary, making lists of all the common words one happens never to use. And of course the really serious-minded way is to study languages--learn Greek, Latin, and one or two modern languages. Among writers of the first rank one can name very few who were not or are not fluent in at least two. Tolstoy, who spoke Russian, French, and English easily, and other languages and dialects with more difficulty, studied Greek in his forties.

Historical accounts of philosophy deal with both the chronological development of ideas over time and the timeliness of those ideas in response to the specific social conditions and challenges of their eras. The chronological perspective follows a particular line of thought as it develops through the years, emphasizing the progressive aspect of philosophizing. New ideas build on former ideas by expanding, modifying, or even rejecting them. In this way schools of thought emerge and the chronological perspective focuses on a community of thinkers who may agree or disagree, but who always share common ground: a cluster of problems, technical vocabulary, forms of analysis, and points of departure.

It is well known that Pentecost reverses Babel. The people who built the tower of Babel sought to make a name, and a unity, for themselves. At Pentecost, God builds his temple, uniting people in Christ. Unity – interpretive agreement and mutual understanding – is, it would appear, something that only God can accomplish. And accomplish it he does, but not in the way we might have expected. Although onlookers thought that the believers who received the Spirit at Pentecost were babbling (Acts 2:13), in fact they were speaking intelligibly in several languages (Acts 2:8-11). Note well: they were all saying the same thing (testifying about Jesus) in different languages. It takes a thousand tongues to say and sing our great Redeemer’s praise. Protestant evangelicalism evidences a Pentecostal plurality: the various Protestant streams testify to Jesus in their own vocabularies, and it takes many languages (i.e. interpretive traditions) to minister the meaning of God’s Word and the fullness of Christ. As the body is made up of many members, so many interpretations may be needed to do justice to the body of the biblical text. Why else are there four Gospels, but that the one story of Jesus was too rich to be told from one perspective only? Could it be that the various Protestant traditions function similarly as witnesses who testify to the same Jesus from different situations and perspectives?

Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company   1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.   2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.   3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.   4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.   5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.   6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.   7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.   8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.   9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

The splitting off of the Oceanic branch of this language family is thought to have taken place in the neighborhood of the Bismarcks around the time of the first Lapita settlement, and it is strongly linked with the rapid colonization of the islands between there and Samoa between 1500 and 1000 B.C. Thus, the reconstruction of Proto-Oceanic opens a window onto the otherwise fairly mysterious Lapita world. Little survives in archaeological contexts in the tropics—none of the baskets or cordage or wooden housewares, no foodstuffs or clothing, no buildings apart from stone foundations and the dark impressions left by long-decayed posts. But something of the texture of these people’s lives can be extracted from their reconstructed vocabulary, working back through the ages via whatever was essential enough to pass on.

I suppose that an American's approach to English literature must always be oblique. We share a language but not a landscape. In order to understand the English classics as adults, we must build up a sort of visual vocabulary from the books we read as children.... I contend that a child brought up on the nursery rhymes and Jacobs' English Fairy Tales can better understand Shakespeare; that a child who has pored over Beatrix Potter can better respond to Wordsworth. Of course it is best if one can find for himself a bank where the wild thyme grows, or discover daffodils growing wild. Failing that, the American child must feed the "inward eye" with the images in the books he reads when young so that he can enter a larger realm when he is older. I am sure I enjoyed the Bronte novels more for having read The Secret Garden first. As I stood on those moors, looking out over that wind-swept landscape I realized that it was Mrs. Burnett who taught me what "wuthering" meant long before I ever got around to reading Wuthering Heights. Epiphany comes at the moment of recognition.

pack under the floor of the car. They engineered it so that the pack became an element of the car’s structure. It was an example of Musk’s policy that the designers sketching the shape of the car should work hand in glove with the engineers who were determining how the car would be built. “At other places I worked,” von Holzhausen says, “there was this throw-it-over-the-fence mentality, where a designer would have an idea and then send it to an engineer, who sat in a different building or in a different country.” Musk put the engineers and designers in the same room. “The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers,” von Holzhausen says. This followed the principle that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had instilled at Apple: design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs once explained. “Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.

And so, when I tell stories today about digital transformation and organizational agility and customer centricity, I use a vocabulary that is very consistent and very refined. It is one of the tools I have available to tell my story effectively. I talk about assumptions. I talk about hypotheses. I talk about outcomes as a measure of customer success. I talk about outcomes as a measurable change in customer behavior. I talk about outcomes over outputs, experimentation, continuous learning, and ship, sense, and respond. The more you tell your story, the more you can refine your language into your trademark or brand—what you’re most known for. For example, baseball great Yogi Berra was famous for his Yogi-isms—sayings like “You can observe a lot by watching” and “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” It’s not just a hook or catchphrase, it helps tell the story as well. For Lean Startup, a best-selling book on corporate innovation written by Eric Ries, the words were “build,” “measure,” “learn.” Jeff Patton, a colleague of mine, uses the phrase “the differences that make a difference.” And he talks about bets as a way of testing confidence levels. He’ll ask, “What will you bet me that your idea is good? Will you bet me lunch? A day’s pay? Your 401(k)?” These words are not only their vocabulary. They are their brand. That’s one of the benefits of storytelling and telling those stories continuously. As you refine your language, the people who are beginning to pay attention to you start adopting that language, and then that becomes your thing.

Focus intently and beat procrastination.    Use the Pomodoro Technique (remove distractions, focus for 25 minutes, take a break).    Avoid multitasking unless you find yourself needing occasional fresh perspectives.    Create a ready-to-resume plan when an unavoidable interruption comes up.    Set up a distraction-free environment.    Take frequent short breaks. Overcome being stuck.    When stuck, switch your focus away from the problem at hand, or take a break to surface the diffuse mode.    After some time completely away from the problem, return to where you got stuck.    Use the Hard Start Technique for homework or tests.    When starting a report or essay, do not constantly stop to edit what is flowing out. Separate time spent writing from time spent editing. Learn deeply.    Study actively: practice active recall (“retrieval practice”) and elaborating.    Interleave and space out your learning to help build your intuition and speed.    Don’t just focus on the easy stuff; challenge yourself.    Get enough sleep and stay physically active. Maximize working memory.    Break learning material into small chunks and swap fancy terms for easier ones.    Use “to-do” lists to clear your working memory.    Take good notes and review them the same day you took them. Memorize more efficiently.    Use memory tricks to speed up memorization: acronyms, images, and the Memory Palace.    Use metaphors to quickly grasp new concepts. Gain intuition and think quickly.    Internalize (don’t just unthinkingly memorize) procedures for solving key scientific or mathematical problems.    Make up appropriate gestures to help you remember and understand new language vocabulary. Exert self-discipline even when you don’t have any.    Find ways to overcome challenges without having to rely on self-discipline.    Remove temptations, distractions, and obstacles from your surroundings.    Improve your habits.    Plan your goals and identify obstacles and the ideal way to respond to them ahead of time. Motivate yourself.    Remind yourself of all the benefits of completing tasks.    Reward yourself for completing difficult tasks.    Make sure that a task’s level of difficulty matches your skill set.    Set goals—long-term goals, milestone goals, and process goals. Read effectively.    Preview the text before reading it in detail.    Read actively: think about the text, practice active recall, and annotate. Win big on tests.    Learn as much as possible about the test itself and make a preparation plan.    Practice with previous test questions—from old tests, if possible.    During tests: read instructions carefully, keep track of time, and review answers.    Use the Hard Start Technique. Be a pro learner.    Be a metacognitive learner: understand the task, set goals and plan, learn, and monitor and adjust.    Learn from the past: evaluate what went well and where you can improve.

THE ORIGIN OF INTELLIGENCE Many theories have been proposed as to why humans developed greater intelligence, going all the way back to Charles Darwin. According to one theory, the evolution of the human brain probably took place in stages, with the earliest phase initiated by climate change in Africa. As the weather cooled, the forests began to recede, forcing our ancestors onto the open plains and savannahs, where they were exposed to predators and the elements. To survive in this new, hostile environment, they were forced to hunt and walk upright, which freed up their hands and opposable thumbs to use tools. This in turn put a premium on a larger brain to coordinate tool making. According to this theory, ancient man did not simply make tools—“tools made man.” Our ancestors did not suddenly pick up tools and become intelligent. It was the other way around. Those humans who picked up tools could survive in the grasslands, while those who did not gradually died off. The humans who then survived and thrived in the grasslands were those who, through mutations, became increasingly adept at tool making, which required an increasingly larger brain. Another theory places a premium on our social, collective nature. Humans can easily coordinate the behavior of over a hundred other individuals involved in hunting, farming, warring, and building, groups that are much larger than those found in other primates, which gave humans an advantage over other animals. It takes a larger brain, according to this theory, to be able to assess and control the behavior of so many individuals. (The flip side of this theory is that it took a larger brain to scheme, plot, deceive, and manipulate other intelligent beings in your tribe. Individuals who could understand the motives of others and then exploit them would have an advantage over those who could not. This is the Machiavellian theory of intelligence.) Another theory maintains that the development of language, which came later, helped accelerate the rise of intelligence. With language comes abstract thought and the ability to plan, organize society, create maps, etc. Humans have an extensive vocabulary unmatched by any other animal, with words numbering in the tens of thousands for an average person. With language, humans could coordinate and focus the activities of scores of individuals, as well as manipulate abstract concepts and ideas. Language meant you could manage teams of people on a hunt, which is a great advantage when pursuing the woolly mammoth. It meant you could tell others where game was plentiful or where danger lurked. Yet another theory is “sexual selection,” the idea that females prefer to mate with intelligent males. In the animal kingdom, such as in a wolf pack, the alpha male holds the pack together by brute force. Any challenger to the alpha male has to be soundly beaten back by tooth and claw. But millions of years ago, as humans became gradually more intelligent, strength alone could not keep the tribe together.

Reading builds a scaffold of vocabulary and word associations that facilitate learning new information. It improves your brain processing speed for text because you have more rapid comprehension.

Even before the first Soviet tanks crossed into Afghanistan in 1979, a movement of Islamists had sprung up nationwide in opposition to the Communist state. They were, at first, city-bound intellectuals, university students and professors with limited countryside appeal. But under unrelenting Soviet brutality they began to forge alliances with rural tribal leaders and clerics. The resulting Islamist insurgents—the mujahedeen—became proxies in a Cold War battle, with the Soviet Union on one side and the United States, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia on the other. As the Soviets propped up the Afghan government, the CIA and other intelligence agencies funneled millions of dollars in aid to the mujahedeen, along with crate after crate of weaponry. In the process, traditional hierarchies came radically undone. When the Communists killed hundreds of tribal leaders and landlords, young men of more humble backgrounds used CIA money and arms to form a new warrior elite in their place. In the West, we would call such men “warlords.” In Afghanistan they are usually labeled “commanders.” Whatever the term, they represented a phenomenon previously unknown in Afghan history. Now, each valley and district had its own mujahedeen commanders, all fighting to free the country from Soviet rule but ultimately subservient to the CIA’s guns and money. The war revolutionized the very core of rural culture. With Afghan schools destroyed, millions of boys were instead educated across the border in Pakistani madrassas, or religious seminaries, where they were fed an extreme, violence-laden version of Islam. Looking to keep the war fueled, Washington—where the prevailing ethos was to bleed the Russians until the last Afghan—financed textbooks for schoolchildren in refugee camps festooned with illustrations of Kalashnikovs, swords, and overturned tanks. One edition declared: Jihad is a kind of war that Muslims fight in the name of God to free Muslims.… If infidels invade, jihad is the obligation of every Muslim. An American text designed to teach children Farsi: Tey [is for] Tofang (rifle); Javed obtains rifles for the mujahedeen Jeem [is for] Jihad; Jihad is an obligation. My mom went to the jihad. The cult of martyrdom, the veneration of jihad, the casting of music and cinema as sinful—once heard only from the pulpits of a few zealots—now became the common vocabulary of resistance nationwide. The US-backed mujahedeen branded those supporting the Communist government, or even simply refusing to pick sides, as “infidels,” and justified the killing of civilians by labeling them apostates. They waged assassination campaigns against professors and civil servants, bombed movie theaters, and kidnapped humanitarian workers. They sabotaged basic infrastructure and even razed schools and clinics. With foreign backing, the Afghan resistance eventually proved too much for the Russians. The last Soviet troops withdrew in 1989, leaving a battered nation, a tottering government that was Communist in name only, and a countryside in the sway of the commanders. For three long years following the withdrawal, the CIA kept the weapons and money flowing to the mujahedeen, while working to block any peace deal between them and the Soviet-funded government. The CIA and Pakistan’s spy agency pushed the rebels to shell Afghan cities still under government control, including a major assault on the eastern city of Jalalabad that flattened whole neighborhoods. As long as Soviet patronage continued though, the government withstood the onslaught. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, however, Moscow and Washington agreed to cease all aid to their respective proxies. Within months, the Afghan government crumbled. The question of who would fill the vacuum, who would build a new state, has not been fully resolved to this day.

Tower of Babylon 11 At one time the whole earth had the same language and vocabulary. 2 As people migrated from the east, they found a valley in the land of •Shinar and settled there. 3 They said to each other, “Come, let us make oven-fired bricks.” They used brick for stone and asphalt for mortar. 4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” 5 Then the LORD came down to look over the city and the tower that the •men were building. 6 The LORD said, “If they have begun to do this as one people all having the same language, then nothing they plan

A final thought occurs to me as I rise out of the coma. It's the formulation I made while standing on top of the building opposite the bookstore: You wake, you die. The reason is this. Everybody dreams. Everybody dreams, but nobody has ever managed to tell me what their dream was like. Not so that I really understood what they saw or felt. Every dream that anyone ever has is theirs alone and they never manage to share it. And they never manage to remember it either. Not truly or accurately. Not as it was. Our memories and our vocabularies aren't up to the job.

A poem a day helps build vocabulary the easy way. Andrew Pender-Smith

A poem a day helps build vocabulary the easy way.

Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company 1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top. 2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary. 3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare. 4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees. 5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts. 6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well. 7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize. 8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company. 9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

The law gave me an entirely new vocabulary, a language that non-lawyers derisively referred to as "legalese." Unlike the basic building blocks- the day-to-day words- that got me from the subway to the office and back, the words of my legal vocabulary, more often than not, triggered flavors that I had experienced after leaving Boiling Springs, flavors that I had chosen for myself, derived from foods that were never contained within the boxes and the cans of DeAnne's kitchen. Subpoenakiwifruit. InjunctionCamembert. Infringementlobster. Jurisdictionfreshgreenbeans. Appellantsourdoughbread. ArbitrationGuinness. Unconstitutionalasparagus. ExculpatoryNutella. I could go on and on, and I did. Every day I was paid an astonishing amount of money to shuffle these words around on paper and, better yet, to say them aloud. At my yearly reviews, the partners I worked for commented that they had never seen a young lawyer so visibly invigorated by her work. One of the many reasons I was on track to make partner, I thought. There were, of course, the rare and disconnecting exceptions. Some legal words reached back to the Dark Ages of my childhood and to the stunted diet that informed my earlier words. "Mitigating," for example, brought with it the unmistakable taste of elementary school cafeteria pizzas: rectangles of frozen dough topped with a ketchup-like sauce, the hard crumbled meat of some unidentifiable animal, and grated "cheese" that didn't melt when heated but instead retained the pattern of a badly crocheted coverlet. I had actually looked forward to the days when these rectangles were on the lunch menu, slapped onto my tray by the lunch ladies in hairnets and comfortable shoes. Those pizzas (even the word itself was pure exuberance with the two z's and the sound of satisfaction at the end... ah!) were evocative of some greater, more interesting locale, though how and where none of us at Boiling Springs Elementary circa 1975 were quite sure. We all knew what hamburgers and hot dogs were supposed to look and taste like, and we knew that the school cafeteria served us a second-rate version of these foods. Few of us students knew what a pizza was supposed to be. Kelly claimed that it was usually very big and round in shape, but both of these characteristics seemed highly improbable to me. By the time we were in middle school, a Pizza Inn had opened up along the feeder road to I-85. The Pizza Inn may or may not have been the first national chain of pizzerias to offer a weekly all-you-can-eat buffet. To the folks of the greater Boiling Springs-Shelby area, this was an idea that would expand their waistlines, if not their horizons. A Sizzler would later open next to the Pizza Inn (feeder road took on a new connotation), and it would offer the Holy Grail of all-you-can-eat buffets: steaks, baked potatoes, and, for the ladies, a salad bar complete with exotic fixings such as canned chickpeas and a tangle of slightly bruised alfalfa sprouts. Along with "mitigating," these were some of the other legal words that also transported me back in time: Egressredvelvetcake. PerpetuityFrenchsaladdressing. Compensatoryboiledpeanuts. ProbateReese'speanutbuttercup. FiduciaryCheerwine. AmortizationOreocookie.

To build and retain foreign vocabulary, scientific definitions, or other factual information, it’s best to review the material one or two days after initial study; then a week later; then about a month later.

I work almost all of my non-sleeping hours, but never do I feel busy, because my work is the fulfillment of my lifeforce. Here, some may say that I am lucky to do what I love, but not everybody finds a livelihood of their choice. To them I say, luck had very little to do with me doing what I love. I am able do what I love, because since my childhood I had only one mission, that is to unite my humankind and that very unshakable mission paved the path for my work. I made my mission my life. I dreamt my mission - I breathed my mission - I lived my mission. Having fun like a teenager does, was not in my dictionary. Getting high and getting laid like an adolescent does, was not in my vocabulary. Going on dates like a teenager does, was not in my book. I had only one vision in front of my eyes, and that was the vision of a united humanity. And today you know me as a humanitarian thinker, because of all those so called "fun times" I sacrificed for a greater goal. And till this day my mission flows through my veins like blood. Now, here I am not saying that an adolescent is not supposed to have fun - in fact, part of the purpose of my work is to build a world where every child from everywhere has the basic right to cherish their childhood without worry, fear and insecurities. So the point is, if you truly can dedicate your life to one single mission, no matter the nature of the mission, then sooner or later the mission itself will pave its own way for you to keep on walking - so, close your eyes, visualize your mission and take the leap of faith.

of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philadelphia—the poorest, with the highest reported rates of violent crime. I unpacked myself in the “ghetto,” as people flippantly called my new neighborhood. The ghetto had expanded in the twentieth century as it swallowed millions of Black people migrating from the South to Western and Northern cities like Philadelphia. White flight followed. The combination of government welfare—in the form of subsidies, highway construction, and loan guarantees—along with often racist developers opened new wealth-building urban and suburban homes to the fleeing Whites, while largely confining Black natives and new Black migrants to the so-called ghettos, now overcrowded and designed to extract wealth from their residents. But the word “ghetto,” as it migrated to the Main Street of American vocabulary, did not conjure a series of racist policies that enabled White flight and Black abandonment—instead, “ghetto” began to describe unrespectable Black behavior on the North Broad Streets of the country.

He had waited a long time for this special December. Now that it was almost upon him, he wasn’t frightened, but he was . . . eager, he decided. He was eager for it to come. And he was excited, certainly. All of the Elevens were excited about the event that would be coming so soon. But there was a little shudder of nervousness when he thought about it, about what might happen. Apprehensive, Jonas decided. That’s what I am.

Karl Marx, observing this disruption in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, could not accept the English evolutionary explanation for the emergence of capitalism. He believed that coercion had been absolutely necessary in effecting this transformation. Marx traced that force to a new class of men who coalesced around their shared interest in production, particularly their need to organize laboring men and women in new work patterns. Separating poor people from the tools and farm plots that conferred independence, according to Marx, became paramount in the capitalists’ grand plan.6 He also stressed the accumulation of capital as a first step in moving away from traditional economic ways. I don’t agree. As Europe’s cathedrals indicate, there was sufficient money to produce great buildings and many other structures like roads, canals, windmills, irrigation systems, and wharves. The accumulation of cultural capital, especially the know-how and desire to innovate in productive ways, proved more decisive in capitalism’s history. And it could come from a duke who took the time to figure out how to exploit the coal on his property or a farmer who scaled back his leisure time in order to build fences against invasive animals. What factory work made much more obvious than the tenant farmer-landlord relationship was the fact that the owner of the factory profited from each worker’s labor. The sale of factory goods paid a meager wage to the laborers and handsome returns to the owners. Employers extracted the surplus value of labor, as Marx called it, and accumulated money for further ventures that would skim off more of the wealth that laborers created but didn’t get to keep. These relations of workers and employers to production created the class relations in capitalist society. The carriers of these novel practices, Marx said, were outsiders—men detached from the mores of their traditional societies—propelled forward by their narrow self-interest. With the cohesion of shared political goals, the capitalists challenged the established order and precipitated the class conflict that for Marx operated as the engine of change. Implicit in Marx’s argument is that the market worked to the exclusive advantage of capitalists. In the early twentieth century another astute philosopher, Max Weber, assessed the grand theories of Smith and Marx and found both of them wanting in one crucial feature: They gave attitudes to men and women that they couldn’t possibly have had before capitalist practices arrived. Weber asked how the values, habits, and modes of reasoning that were essential to progressive economic advance ever rooted themselves in the soil of premodern Europe characterized by other life rhythms and a moral vocabulary different in every respect. This inquiry had scarcely troubled English economists or historians before Weber because they operated on the assumption that human nature made men (little was said of women) natural bargainers and restless self-improvers, eager to be productive when productivity

I think I would live by Albert Schweitzer’s three basic rules for raising children: First, example; second, example; third, example. But I wouldn’t go quite that far. I would say, first, example; second, build a caring and affirming relationship; and third, teach some of the simple ideas underlying the habits in the language of children—help them gain a basic understanding and vocabulary of the 7 Habits and show them how to process their own experiences through the principles; let them identify what particular principles and habits are being illustrated in their lives.

Of all the metaphors found in architecture, there have been few put to such a variety of uses, and certainly none so contentious, as those derived from language.

We talk as a matter of course about ‘reading’ a plan […] but to talk of ‘reading’ a plan is a very long way from claiming that a work of architecture is a linguistic sign.

Within orthodox modernism, works of architecture were not there o be ‘read’ as narratives to external events – they were there to be themselves.

Do we only have gender neuter architecture now? Does a particular system of mental distinction, in use for the best part of two millennia, cease simply because the metaphors in which it was presented have become unsuitable?

Although, as has been suggested, part of the attraction of these metaphors may have lain in their making architecture seem like science, and so amenable to scientific procedures of analysis, what they really do is – paradoxically – to confirm the opposite, that architecture is not a science, indeed is not particularly like a science.

Successful metaphors rely on the unlikeness of things, not upon their likeness.

Metaphors are experiments with the possible likenesses of unlike things.

The combination of government welfare—in the form of subsidies, highway construction, and loan guarantees—along with often racist developers opened new wealth-building urban and suburban homes to the fleeing Whites, while largely confining Black natives and new Black migrants to the so-called ghettos, now overcrowded and designed to extract wealth from their residents. But the word “ghetto,” as it migrated to the Main Street of American vocabulary, did not conjure a series of racist policies that enabled White flight and Black abandonment—instead, “ghetto” began to describe unrespectable Black behavior on the North Broad Streets of the country.

So, I challenge the voice in your head, starting today, to erase the phrase “I don’t have time” from its vocabulary. Instead, your voice must say, “It’s not a priority.” If you’re truly committed to building your life into something you’re proud of, then that has to take priority over Facebook, over video games, over watching cat videos on YouTube, over TV, and so on. Once we stop allowing ourselves to say, “I don’t have time,” and truly look at where our time is being spent, we will find some pockets of time here and there for focusing on growth and on the quests and missions we need to complete in order to level up.

Build Your Word Hoard Practice: The Vocabulary of a Subject Pick a subject you know something about. (If you can’t think of one, start by making a list.) Then, without stopping, spend five to ten minutes collecting every word you can think of that has something to do with this subject. If you get stuck, just repeat a word. Don’t worry about whether the words are “right” or whether they mean what you think they mean. Just play with them and see what happens. Say the words under your breath, so that they will have some voice to them instead of just appearing silently in your mind. After you’re done collecting, go back through your list and mark whichever words stand out for you, then play around with them to form sentences. Make sense, if you feel like it; be silly if you don’t. Give yourself at least ten minutes for this practice. Afterwards, if you like, take a moment or two to write down what happened as you did it. What did you notice?

Build Your Word Hoard Practice: The Vocabulary of a Personal Experience Choose a subject from personal experience (a place, a person, or an adventure, perhaps). Take five to ten minutes (or more, if you like) to collect, without stopping, every word that comes to you about this subject. Then, as before, select some words and make sentences (or lines of poetry or dialogue, if you prefer) with them. While your goal should be to just play with the words and see what happens, you may find yourself moving into freewriting about your subject. If you find yourself stuck when you want to write about a subject, whether it be a personal experience or not, it can help to start by collecting the vocabulary of that subject. Sometimes just playing with those words can lead you to things you want to say. Build Your Word Hoard Practice: The Vocabulary of a Character Choose a character of your own invention, or use one from a book you love, and bring him firmly to mind. Then imagine that this character is speaking, and collect the words you hear him use. Just focus on words first, as you did in the above practices. Then, once you have collected a long list of this character’s words, choose some of them to make sentences (or partial sentences, if you like) that this character would speak. Build Your Word Hoard Practice: A Vocabulary That Fits Your Readers Have you ever noticed that you often speak differently to different people? Hey, man, wazzup? you might say to your buddy, while Good morning, Mr. Jones would probably be the way you’d address your boss. The same thing can happen when we write: We can choose to select words appropriate to our readers. You may want to experiment with this by picking a subject you know something about and imagining an audience. Now, just as in the previous exercises, unpack from your word hoard the words you need to use to write about your subject to this particular audience. After doing this for a while, pick a different audience and collect words again. For instance, you could pick your eight-year-old nephew the first time, and a professor or supervisor the second. What do you notice about the words you unpack? If you like, you might also want to select words from each list and write some sentences, first to one audience, then to the other. This will give you some good practice in what it feels like to write for different audiences.

5 Tips for Mirroring Others 1. Body language. When they smile, you smile. When they lean back in their chair, you lean back in your chair. When they cross their legs or fold their arms, you do the same. 2. Vocabulary or specific words. Notice their language and the words they choose and use—their keywords, expressions, expletives, or phrases. 3. Communication style. People receive, process, and deliver information in different ways. Notice whether someone is results driven or relaxed, emotional or pragmatic, talkative or observant. Recognizing their style will enable you to adapt your style to theirs to build rapport and improve communication. 4. Vocal style. a. Speech rate—If they are talking fast, you talk fast. If they are talking slowly, you talk slowly. Consider rhythm, pace, and tempo. b. Volume—If they are speaking quietly and softly, match their volume. c. Tone—Mirror their emotion, tone, and pitch. You can even seek to mirror their grammar and dialect, as long as it is discreet and respectful.

Spence beached the boat and strutted up to where Denny and Mr. Jones were working. He stared at Denny and smiled. “You got enough of that shit on your face?” he asked. Mr. Jones look up sharply. “What’s the matter with you?” he said. “You don’t talk to a lady like that.” Spence laughed. “What lady?” he said. Denny blushed. She could see the anger building in Mr. Jones’s eyes. “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “I don’t care.” Mr. Jones turned to her. “Well, you should,” he told her, his eyes flashing, “and Mr. Spencer here would respect you more if you did, whether he realizes it or not.” Spence snorted derisively. “Well, like it or not, you keep a civil tongue while you’re working for me, mister, understand?” said Mr. Jones. Spence shrugged. “You’re the boss,” he said, and started walking up toward the shack. Mr. Jones picked up a nail. “You kids today use too darn much profanity anyway,” he yelled. He banged the nail into the brace. “You use it anytime, anyplace. It’s not right.” He banged another nail. “Shows a lack of respect, not to mention a deficient vocabulary.” He slammed another nail into the wood. “There’s a time and a place for profanity.” He held another nail and smashed the hammer down. “Aagh! Like now! Dammit!” He dropped the hammer and grabbed his thumb. Denny covered her mouth and turned away so he wouldn’t see her laugh, but he saw anyway. “Oh, very funny, huh?” said Mr. Jones. Denny couldn’t stop giggling. Soon she had Mr. Jones laughing too. “That’s what I get for trying to defend your honor,” he said. “Sorry,” said Denny. She looked up the hill and saw Spence duck into the shed. There was a burst of loud, muffled laughter, and she started giggling all over again. “All right, all right,” said Mr. Jones. “Are you going to go get me a Band-Aid or do I have to stand here and bleed to death while you and your friend up there make sport of me?

Using Words Learning to express their potent reactions in words rather than in actions is critical for spirited children. If they can tell us they are angry, they don’t have to kick us to get the message across. It’s our labels that they turn to as they are building their vocabulary—the words we use to describe and explain intensity. Three-year-old Al is a blond, tousled-haired minitornado. “I’ve got gusto,” he informed me. “My dad says it’s okay to do things with gusto—as long as you don’t hurt anybody!” “I’m full of it,” a five-year-old shared, “just like my Grandpa Dick.” “My mom plays whisper games with me to help me practice my soft voice because usually I’ve very dramatic,” six-year-old Chrissie exclaimed. “I have powerful reactions,” eight-year-old Kerry told me. These children, as young as three (and sometimes even two) understand their intensity and feel good about it. They haven’t been told they were wild, aggressive, or mean. The words to describe their intensity have focused on the vim, vigor, and energy racing through their body in a positive way. It is those words that help them to feel comfortable with their intensity rather than embarrassed or frightened by it. As a result, they don’t have to run wild, scream, hit, or throw things to express themselves—at least most of the time. They can talk about it instead.

When you learn the rules and the vocabulary of investing and begin to build your asset column, I think you’ll find that it’s as fun a game as you’ve ever played. Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn. But have fun. Most people never win because they’re more afraid of losing. That is why I found school so silly. In school we learn that mistakes are bad, and we are punished for making them. Yet if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down. If we never fell down, we would never walk. The same is true for learning to ride a bike. I still have scars on my knees, but today I can ride a bike without thinking. The same is true for getting rich. Unfortunately, the main reason most people are not rich is because they are terrified of losing. Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.

I took a cab into the centre of town and listened to the driver’s running commentary on all that ailed his beloved city, on the good old days when he could have a beer and a dance, and how he had escaped to America to study engineering but couldn’t afford the university fees and was forced to return home after a year. ‘Now, drive taxi in Tehran. No beer. No fun.’ He shrugged, resigned to his fate. After about twenty minutes, once his English vocabulary had been depleted, his analysis of Tehran’s problems was distilled down to two descriptions as he pointed at buildings in turn as we passed by. ‘Reza Shah!’ he would shout triumphantly at anything remotely grand or old. ‘Islamic Republic!’ he spat at each shoddy concrete office block.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.

A class meeting is a small group that is primarily focused on transformation and not information, where people learn how to interpret their entire lives through the lens of the gospel, build a vocabulary for giving voice to their experience of God, and grow in faith in Christ.

It’s what the S.R.A. vocabulary building cards call a ‘paradox.’ That’s when you have two things that are true, but they don’t agree.

WIFE,

The analysts feel immense pressure to recommend the stocks of companies that their firm underwrites, or whose underwriting business they are seeking. Analysts are frequently threatened with discipline, or worse, for making unfavorable recommendations about such companies, and their recommendations are laced with euphemisms such as “outperform,” “accumulate,” or “hold.” Because it may anger a potential underwriting client, the word “sell” does not seem to be in their vocabulary.

We begin with teaching kids feeling words (Vocabulary), that lead to statements like, “I feel sad that my sister won’t play with me.” These statements then lead to actions (Resourcefulness), or taking the emotion to something constructive. These are the foundational building blocks of emotional development.

Freedom in adaptation has two applications. The first is in relationship to the unbeliever. Here we need to be willing to set aside our forms of religious practices, our scruples of conduct in questionable matters, our elaborate doctrines that will only serve to confound the simplicity of the gospel to the searching unbeliever, and even our religious vocabulary. We need to go where unbelievers are and build relationships with them within the context of their world. We need to adapt to them and feel comfortable in their presence and in their circumstances. We need to love them and accept them whether they put their trust in Christ or not. This is genuine adaptation.

ESTABLISH A BASIS FOR TRUST THROUGH OPENNESS AND TRANSPARENCY. It’s important to frame the conversation with the kind of vocabulary that conveys the open, bidirectional nature of the relationship. Use words like trust, transparency, and alliance. Another key way to demonstrate openness is to be willing to discuss scenarios in which the employee might leave the company. This kind of transparency helps build trust and reduces the risk of being blindsided by a departure.

Commit to mastering three to four new words every day. People with a rich vocabulary seldom have trouble articulating their views and display greater confidence while talking to people. The difference between a functional vocabulary and extensive vocabulary can be the difference between a black and white and vivid, colorful picture. Paint a picture with your words to make the conversation more interesting and compelling. Stay away from redundant words and phrases. Avoid using conversation fillers. Keep your sentences short, crisp and to the point. Do not use the most highfalutin words to flaunt your vocabulary. Instead be an effective communicator by using words that convey your ideas and feelings most appropriately. Less is always more in a conversation. Try to say more by using less yet effective words and phrases. Think of better and more articulate ways to convey your emotions and ideas, For example, you can say “famished” in place of “very hungry” or “livid” instead of “very angry or upset.” Try to convey your ideas using more effective words. Replace redundant words and phrases in your daily conversations. For example, instead of saying, “They said xyz about my looks” say “they commented on my looks.” The idea is to make your speech crisper, more articulate and tighter by replacing ineffectual words/phrases with more meaningful expressions. Everyday words and phrases such as “big” can become “gigantic,” “massive” or “colossal.” Similarly, scared can become “petrified” and “spooked,” hungry become “famished” and so on. Consciously think of more effective ways to convey the same meaning. This practice will make you come across as a more engaging, interesting and vibrant conversationalist. A richer and more power-packed vocabulary lends more character, feelings and sensory experiences to the conversation. The way to go about it is – Use a diary or notebook for listing new words and phrases you come across each day. You can also randomly pick three new words to learn from the dictionary every day, and try to use it in your speech or conversation. Install ‘word a day’ applications on your phones to keep enriching your vocabulary. It’s a work in progress. You’ll never know everything. Even if you believe you have a limited vocabulary or aren’t able to hold a conversation because you don’t know how best to express yourself, breathe easy. There are plenty of ways to build a powerful vocabulary if you have the initiative.

A head of corporate communications at a large public organization once shared his belief that the major organizational change sometimes begins innocuously at the level of vocabulary: "People start using words that suggest change has happened, even if it hasn't happened yet. That's the first step," he said.

Modernity became ugly because we forgot how to articulate that beauty is, in the end, as much of a necessity for a building as a functioning roof. We lost the vocabulary to describe our pain.

Difficult Distinctions: Famous and Infamous In a book by a well-known writer I once saw the phrase “Mom’s infamous recipe for pumpkin soup,” in which one mischosen word turned the meaning of the phrase around. Something famous is well known for its good or desirable qualities; a famous person is outstanding or distinguished in some way, and therefore admired. But something infamous (IN-fuh-mus) is remarkable for its bad qualities and bad reputation; it is notorious, scandalous, disgraceful, or evil. Thus, a family with a famous recipe for soup would cherish that recipe for generations, while a family with an infamous recipe for soup would have a hard time filling the chairs at the dinner table.

Many AI researchers today claim that their systems are cognitively inspired (in particular inspired by the popular System 1/System 2 distinction introduced by Daniel Kahneman in his dual-process theory) just because their decision-making mechanisms couple both fast routines and slow decision-making strategies. This is a clear example (one of the many in the field) of the misconceptions that have been raised by the shallow ascription of labels coming from the cognitive vocabulary to the behavior and/or design of such systems. Unfortunately, it is not sufficient to just implement “fast” and “slow” mechanisms in an artificial system to claim any kind of cognitive inspiration or of cognitive plausibility. To make one of these claims, in fact, one should build and integrate algorithms in a way that is much more constrained with respect to such a generic and shallow description of how an intelligent system (natural or artificial) works (note: the book Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) was written for a popular audience and therefore contains obvious oversimplifications of the dual-process theory of reasoning. Unfortunately, many people in AI have considered the book as a scientific publication ignoring the actual scientific papers laying down the theory). For example, one should consider "how” such fast or slow mechanisms are built, how they interact between them (both within the System 1/System 2 components and between them), how they evolve over time (e.g. System 2 mechanisms can be “automatized” and become System 1 routines) etc. In Cognitive Design for Artificial Minds, the distinction between these “shallow” and “constrained” systems is made clear by introducing the “functional” and “structural” design approaches and by exploring the different explanatory roles that such design perspectives put in place.

Minimum Competency A working knowledge, (i.e., minimum competency) involves the following: You understand relevant vocabulary and terms. You have the ability to ask intelligent questions. You have the basic skills and capacity to DO what’s required. You have an idea of where to go in order to learn more. You have the necessary humility to get help when you need it.

rewritten

we will demonstrate how a short list of concrete design guidelines and a small vocabulary can be used to create APIs that expose enough information to be usable by a completely generic API browser. Based on a simple prototype, we will show how easily such a, at first sight, disruptive approach can be integrated in current Web frameworks and how it can be used to build interoperable and evolvable APIs in considerably less time.

Yeah. They wake up a couple of times in the night, but, you know, that is the ineffable nature of the young!” I said. This woman was bound to be impressed by what an engaged big sister I was. Also, my vocabulary.

Today, community service is sometimes used as a patch to cover over inarticulateness about the inner life. Not long ago, I asked the head of a prestigious prep school how her institution teaches its students about character. She answered by telling me how many hours of community service the students do. That is to say, when I asked her about something internal, she answered by talking about something external. Her assumption seemed to be that if you go off and tutor poor children, that makes you a good person yourself. And so it goes. Many people today have deep moral and altruistic yearnings, but, lacking a moral vocabulary, they tend to convert moral questions into resource allocation questions. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I have impact? Or, worst of all: How can I use my beautiful self to help out those less fortunate than I? The atmosphere at Hull House was quite different. The people who organized the place had a specific theory about how to build character, equally for those serving the poor and for the poor themselves. Addams, like many of her contemporaries, dedicated her life to serving the needy, while being deeply suspicious of compassion. She was suspicious of its shapelessness, the way compassionate people tended to ooze out sentiment on the poor to no practical effect. She also rejected the self-regarding taint of the emotion, which allowed the rich to feel good about themselves because they were doing community service. “Benevolence is the twin of pride,” Nathaniel Hawthorne had written. Addams had no tolerance for any pose that might put the server above those being served. As with all successful aid organizations, she wanted her workers

I've always liked fairytales. It was probably the illustrations that first drew me in – beautiful ones from an Italian publisher, if I recall. But growing up in the country, surrounded by trees, fairly isolated and with rather primitive technology at the house, the stories seemed to seep into reality more than they might have otherwise. Fairytales are also a wonderful vocabulary (almost an alphabet) of storytelling among people who know them. You can use fairytale elements to build entirely new stories; images that work as independent pictures and narratives for viewers and readers who are new to them. But once that audience becomes aware of the depth of history and the ongoing conversation that is happening through all those layers of tellings and retellings and reimaginings, there is a splendid depth and resonance you can access.

The brain is more like a muscle and less like a storage area. If you really want to be a writer, you should want to write a lot. If you want to write a lot, then you need to be in training. You are preparing to run marathons, not emptying a suitcase. Learning new languages, acquiring new vocabulary, keeping yourself in various forms of constant logocentric discipline is one of the best things you can do. And language acquisition is nothing if not logocentric discipline.

Table 6.1 Skill Categories Skill Category Description Comment Determining the Meaning of Words (Word Meaning) Student determines the meaning of words in context by recognizing known words and connecting them to prior vocabulary knowledge. Student uses a variety of skills to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words, including pronouncing words to trigger recognition, searching for related words with similar meanings, and analyzing prefixes, roots, and suffixes. This skill category includes more than just lexical access, as word identification and lexical recall are combined with morphological analyses. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Sentences (Sentence Meaning) Student builds upon an understanding of words and phrases to determine the meaning of a sentence. Student analyzes sentence structures and draws on an understanding of grammar rules to determine how the parts of speech in a sentence operate together to support the overall meaning. Student confirms that his or her understanding of a sentence makes sense in relationship to previous sentences, personal experience, and general knowledge of the world. This skill category focuses on the syntactical, grammatical, and semantic case analyses that support elementary proposition encoding and integration of propositions across contiguous sentences. Understanding the Situation Implied by a Text (Situation Model) Student develops a mental model (i.e., image, conception) of the people, things, setting, actions, ideas, and events in a text. Student draws on personal experience and world knowledge to infer cause-and-effect relationships between actions and events to fill in additional information needed to understand the situation implied by the text. This skill category is a hybrid of the explicit text model and the elaborated situation model described by Kintsch (1998). As such, category three combines both lower-level explicit text interpretation and higher-level inferential processes that connect the explicit text to existing knowledge structures and schemata. Understanding the Content, Form, and Function of Larger Sections of Text (Global Text Meaning) Student synthesizes the meaning of multiple sentences into an understanding of paragraphs or larger sections of texts. Student recognizes a text’s organizational structure and uses that organization to guide his or her reading. Student can identify the main point of, summarize, characterize, or evaluate the meaning of larger sections of text. Student can identify underlying assumptions in a text, recognize implied consequences, and draw conclusions from a text. This skill category focuses on the integration of local propositions into macro-level text structures (Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978) and more global themes (Louwerse & Van Peer, 2003). It also includes elaborative inferencing that supports interpretation and critical comprehension, such as identifying assumptions, causes, and consequence and drawing conclusions at the level of the situation model. Analyzing Authors’ Purposes, Goals, and Strategies (Pragmatic Meaning) Student identifies an author’s intended audience and purposes for writing. Student analyzes an author’s choices regarding content, organization, style, and genre, evaluating how those choices support the author’s purpose and are appropriate for the intended audience and situation. This skill category includes contextual and pragmatic discourse analyses that support interpretation of texts in light of inferred authorial intentions and strategies.

Abolition involves dismantling institutions that reproduce and mask harm, but it also demands the more radical work to imagine and to build up practices, vocabularies, and communities that facilitate self-determination. The work to build up community responses to end sexual violence; the mobilizations to challenge the indefinite caging of our communities; our collective and daily labor inside and outside of prisons to demand other futures—this is decidedly radical feminist work.

Deconstructed, I find its bits and pieces everywhere around me in the architecture of my social world. I find components of its violence in the sexism of your comments. I find it in the way you touch me without asking. I find it in the way you call that girl a whore. I find its bits and pieces of violence, the building blocks of sexual assault, in the psyches and vocabularies of my boyfriend, my professors, and my friends.

Deconstructed, I find its bits and pieces everywhere around me in the architecture of my social world. I find components of its violence in the sexism of your comments. I find it in the way you touch me without asking. I find it in the way you call that girl a whore. I find its bits and pieces of violence, the building blocks of sexual assault, in the psyches and vocabularies of my boyfriend, my professors, and my friends.

The Minnesota State Weather observer at Pine River Dam recorded a minimum temperature of 46 below on December 29; observers at Pokegama Falls and Leech Lake Dam were unable to take temperature readings that day because the mercury inside their government-issued thermometers froze solid. It's hard to find vocabulary for weather this cold. The senses first become sharp and then dulled. Objects etch themselves with hyperclarity on the dense air, but it's hard to keep your eyes open to look at them steadily. When you first step outside from a heated space, the blast from 46-below-zero air clears the mind like a ringing slap. After a breath or two, ice builds up on the hairs of your nasal passages and the clear film bathing your eyeballs thickens. If the wind is calm and your body, head, and hands are covered, you feel preternaturally alert and focused. At first. A dozen paces from the door, your throat begins to feel raw, your lips dry and crack, tears sting the corners of your eyes. The cold becomes at once a knife and, paradoxically, a flame, cutting and scorching exposed skin.

In typical Koch fashion, the company developed a specific strategy to grow, one that came complete with its own vocabulary. The framework was called the Value Creation Strategy, or VCS. Every Koch business leader was expected to create their own Value Creation Strategy. They needed to look for new companies to buy, new plants to build, and expansion projects for existing plants. This wasn’t exactly new—growth was ingrained in Koch’s DNA from the beginning, when Sterling Varner encouraged his employees to keep their eyes peeled for investment opportunities. But the VCS regimen was different. Business leaders knew that Charles Koch would cut or increase their bonus pay based on the Value Creation Strategies they delivered. Expansion was once applauded; now it would be required. This change rippled out through the ranks.

Training our attention to identify needs (our own and others’) involves: • Expanding our vocabulary for needs Training our attention to see life through the “lens of needs” Building close relationships of trust and mutual respect, in which we feel safe enough to explore needs Attuning to the level of vulnerability that supports understanding and collaboration, depending on the context • Learning to be at peace with unmet needs Developing the ability to shift our attention from the personal to the universal aspect of needs, from a narrow focus on satisfying our needs to a broader appreciation for the beauty of human needs