Anyone looking to beef up their vocabulary should head down to bookstores tomorrow and pick up a copy of children's author Maryrose Wood's The Unmapped Sea. The latest installment in Wood's Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place series, it continues the story of 15-year-old Victorian-era governess Penelope Lumley and her three charges.
The series is delightfully rich in vocabulary. Book one, The Mysterious Howling, is not only peppered with words like eloquence, melancholy, tableau, quaint, voluminous, shirking, jaunty, cavalier, circumnavigation, enigmatic, declaim, clamber, and amok, it features words from other languages, such as the French tant pis and the Latin tabula rasa. Wood also slips in some pretty exciting technical vocabulary, such as pteridological, meaning related to ferns, and explications of the literary terms irony and hyperbole.
The series is geared to an upper elementary/middle school-age reader, and in anticipation of the publication of book five tomorrow, we asked Wood to describe why she is so committed to sharing these high-level words with this age group. Check out her answers to learn how she finds words, what resources she uses, and how standout words can sometimes even determine the direction of her story. Then be sure to look at the 200+ words we've collected in four Unmapped Sea Vocabulary Lists.
Vocabulary.com: We love that you are introducing young readers to A+ words through stories that are so fun and engaging child readers will hardly notice the vocabulary lesson. We’re hoping you might explain how this came to be. Was it essential to the character of your narrator that he or she would know and use these words?
Maryrose Wood: To clarify, the omniscient narrator of the Incorrigible Children books is not a character in the story. She (or he) lives “nowadays,” and yet seems to have a perfect and somewhat nostalgic familiarity with “the way things were” in “Miss Lumley’s day,” which is early 1850s, England. Even so, the narrator clearly knows all that has happened before and since Miss Lumley’s day, from the invention of the character of Sherlock Holmes to the contemporary proliferation of bank branches on every corner.
That the narrative voice takes a more 19th century approach to language than, say, a 21st century approach (did u get my txt?) is one strategy the books use to transport the contemporary kid reader to this very different time, where fifteen year old girls work as governesses in great households, and the young wards of a wealthy lord might study the history of Ancient Rome, learn how to paint portraits in oils, and eagerly recite poetry by Longfellow (and this despite having been raised by wolves!).
Speaking of governesses, it’s worth noting that the practices of teaching and learning are deeply embedded in the plot of each book in the series. The narrator’s intrusive and chatty way of offering new words and information to You, the Reader, acts as an amusing frame for the way the teenaged governess, Miss Penelope Lumley, does the same for her pupils, the three Incorrigible children.
VC: How did you come up with the words themselves? Did you need to look them up in a dictionary as you went along to confirm they were accurate? Do you use a thesaurus?
MW: I use both a dictionary and a thesaurus, and I look up words and facts frequently as I write. I might need to clarify a bit of geography or find out exactly how bathtubs worked in the mid-Victorian era. I’m not a historian and the books are freely written in that sense; they strive for just enough historical detail accuracy to give a flavor of the times, but if there’s going to be an anachronism I’d rather do it on purpose than by accident.
Anachronism, by the way, is precisely the type of word the Incorrigible narrator would delight in defining for the reader. It simply means a thing that does not, strictly speaking, belong in the time period in which it is shown to exist. The Greek roots are ana (against) and khronos (time), so it would literally translate as “to go against time.” Just looking this up has given me an idea for a scene in Book 6, which is the book I’m currently writing! So you can see right there how the process works. The vocabulary is both an inspiration for and a consequence of the creative choices made while writing these books.
VC: Okay...pteridological. Is there a backstory here?
MW: Well, it’s such a fantastic word, isn’t it? It means the study of ferns. It’s another word that popped up while I was doing research, and once I saw it I knew I’d have to use it. Pteridomania, the obsession with ferns, was a real thing in Victorian England. I have a lovely coffee-table book called Fern Fever: The Story of Pteridomania, by Sarah Whittingham, that explores the whole topic. It wasn’t just wealthy Victorians who were fern-besotted, it was everyone (I ought to say is, not was: the British Pteridological Society is still going strong!). I introduced the word casually in book one, The Mysterious Howling, and then Penelope’s interest in ferns kept getting mentioned and embroidered upon throughout the series, until it finally led to a scene in book four, The Interrupted Tale, in which we actually meet the esteemed Mrs. Worthington, of the Heathcote Amateur Pteridological Society!
VC: What is your own backstory when it comes to ten-cent words? What did the word vocabulary mean to you when you were school age? Where do you find new words now?
MW: I was that kid who read all the time, anything and everything, including (and perhaps especially) stuff that was way over my rather naïve suburban head. I would freely mispronounce words I’d absorbed from the page but never heard spoken, and I talked in long periodic sentences, because my instincts about language were derived more from written language than spoken. I recall being asked once as a child if I were British, and of course I was born in Queens and raised on Long Island, so this was ridiculous, but I think it was because of the multi-clause sentences.
I find new words now in my own reading, which is eclectic. Occasionally I’m foolish enough to play Scrabble with a friend of mine who is demonically good at Scrabble. I occasionally like doing crossword puzzles, but for me a word is best learned in context.
VC: What was the last (or a recent) word you encountered that you could not define?
MW: I always have to check the difference between psychopath and sociopath. Luckily this doesn’t come up too often! And I just looked up orb because a writing student of mine used it in a way that felt off, and I wanted to make sure I was right before correcting her. For your information, an orb is a sphere or globe-shaped object.
VC: Are readers responding to the high-level vocabulary found in Incorrigible Children? Can you tell us a bit about this?
MW: Oh, they enjoy it a lot; it’s quite empowering to learn new words. A new word enlarges one’s capacity for thought. That’s a big deal! Happily, kids don’t have the same resistance to new information that adults do. Adult egos can get very prickly when exposed to something unfamiliar. To kids the whole world is new. They expect not to know stuff, and their darling, plastic little brains are programmed for language acquisition. If they can learn the names of the all the Pokemon, why can’t they learn all the Greek and Latin roots?
I often get positive feedback from teachers and librarians and homeschooling families, because the language in the books is challenging but there is a lot of scaffolding snuck in there. I don’t think a word like weltschmerz or hyperbole or paradox ought to be dropped in without some clear signposts as to what it means, and I work hard to weave a ten-cent word into the storytelling in a clear and often comic way, so learning and then deploying the word becomes part of the fun of the tale.
VC: Finally, we’d love you to share with us your favorite word. Do you have one? Your least favorite?
MW: There are so many delicious words; who could choose just one? Circumnavigate is a fine word. Becalmed, another excellent word. Serendipity, lovely. Usurper! I mean, they don’t get better than usurper.
My college-aged daughter did a project where the students had to collect data on people’s least-favorite word. It turned out to be moist. Why is that, I wonder? A warm, moist brownie fresh from the oven could only be good news, in my opinion.
We think it's fun that more than a dozen lines from Wood's Incorrigible series show up in our Dictionary's usage tracker, which compiles real world sentence examples for every word we define. Here are screen shots of three of these words. Click through to see each Dictionary page in full.
