Honest, I didn’t make up that word: I found it this morning on my RSS feed from Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day. The experts there tell us that frigorific is an adjective meaning : causing cold : chilling. This morning it is 14 degrees here in New York City — definitely frigorific.
A half century ago when I was a student at El Paso, Texas’ Austin High School, Mrs. Emma Burtis taught a class called 7B English. Mrs. Burtis was also sponsor of the school’s club for student writers. Mrs. Burtis had her own word-of-the-day, on steroids! We rushed to get seated in her classroom as early as we could, because each class session began with seven words written on the blackboard (no green or white boards in those days). The first ten minutes or so of the class was, for us students, taken up by the challenge of looking up the words and writing a sentence using each of them. Class discussion ensued.
We came to refer among ourselves to “7B words.” Most of the words were hard, like frigorific. The result of the exercise Mrs. Burtis imposed was not to create a bunch of sixteen-year-olds walking around calling cold days “frigorific” — a word BTW that my spellchecker keeps underlining in red. What it did teach us was the there was more to vocabulary that the limited expressions teenagers, thinking they are hot, or cool, or whatever. The 7B exercise created curiosity in us about words, and got me into the life-long habit of looking up words that I do not know when I come across them.
7B English on steroids: Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is Mrs. Burtis virtually. It is only one word at a time, but it is every day, free, automatically popping up on my desktop. Just as she would do in the class discussion, Word of the Day provides the precise definition of the word, uses it in sentences. And as Mrs. Burtis would have done for us, you can hear the word correctly pronounced and used in a sentence, along with some discussion of its origin.
Austin High was a great school when I was there, at a time when public education was at its best. Mrs. Burtis was a superb teacher. Yet for awakening the yen for words, the Merriam-Webster daily offering adds a powerful new dimension we did not have in 7B English. The daily word is even available in kids’ pockets on their mobile phone internet browsers. Today, when there are many students whose schools offer very little opportunity for vocabulary stimulus, Word of the Day is very, very cool — downright frigorific.
