> Julia wrote-
> After my sister and I both had had some German and some Latin, we
> discovered very quickly that it was a bad idea to ask the meaning of a
> word within earshot of our mother. While "look it up" had been the
> response a few short years earlier, she made us dissect the word and
> figure out what parts of it came from what word in Latin, or what word was
> cognate with it in German; and after you've gone through that 3 or 4
> times, you just ask for someone to pass you the dictionary and don't even
> bother asking about any definitions. (Now, if the dictionary definition
> doesn't make sense for the word in the context in which you met it, then
> you can have a discussion about it where you're not being asked to be an
> etymologist.)
You are reminding me of my vocabulary book in highschool. .... And you
lived it? Sheesh, you must have *kicked butt* on standardized testing. :-)
Dee
