Teachers and parents may drive themselves crazy with the thought that vocabulary learning among today's children is "not what it used to be," imagining scintillating dinner table conversations of yore between children who speak with the erudition of Supreme Court Justices and their beaming parents. (In past posts we've noted comic John Branyan's riff on shrinking vocabulary and thirteen-year-old blogger Teen T more sincere statement of concern.)
But what if kids have always been intimidated by "big words," finding them off-putting and avoiding them at all costs?
Recently, reading through the sentence examples in the Vocabulary.com Dictionary page for peregrinate, we came across a primary source document suggesting that children a century ago found long words to be just as intimidating as they do now.
Peregrinate pointed us to the 1895 children's novel Little Colonel. (Enormously popular in its time, Little Colonel spawned many sequels as well as a 1935 film of the same name, featuring Lionel Barrymore, Shirley Temple, Hattie McDaniel, and dancer Bill Robinson, who led Temple in the first interracial dance sequence in Hollywood history.) One scene in the novel shows us "Mary" trying to escape an undesirable playmate by learning words sure to make her playmate's eyes glaze over. Explaining this to a kindly older character who finds her copying words out of a dictionary, she says:
"I'm hunting up the longest words I can find and learning their definitions, so that I can use them properly."
Rob, looking over her shoulder, laughed to see the list she had chosen:
"Indefatigability, Juxtaposition, Loquaciousness, Pabulum, Peregrinate, Longevous."
"You see," explained Mary, "…Here's [a quote] from Shakespeare about alacrity. And here's one from Arbuthnot, whoever he was, that will make her stare."
She traced the sentence with her forefinger, for Rob's glance to follow: "Instances of longevity are chiefly among the abstemious."
"Girlie won't have any more idea of what I'm talking about than a jay-bird."
Of course, young Mary and her playmate lived in a time that predated Vocabulary.com. In our current era, they might have solved their game-playing and word-learning quandaries by downloading the Vocabulary.com app and going head to head on the word learning game that makes fussy doll play look as dull as a child who speaks as if they belong on the Supreme Court.