Excerpt from "Outlaws and Highwaymen"

Just as "highwayman" sounds like a better word for "robber," everything that's British sounds like it belongs to a higher way. In an informational text, Gillian Spraggs questions that assumption in her focus on "Outlaws and Highwaymen."

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 7 Unit 4's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, maggie and milly and molly and may, Mother to Son, Haikus, It Happened in Montgomery, Monologues, The Raven, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, Casey at the Bat, Outlaws and Highwaymen, The Highwayman, We Wear the Mask, Twelfth Night
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. corrupt
    make illegal payments to in exchange for favors or influence
    The legal system was corrupted by influence and bribery, so it was hard to bring serious criminals to justice.
  2. gentry
    the most powerful members of a society
    Stories and legends about outlaws were popular with the gentry and their household retainers.
  3. depict
    give a description of
    The outlaw of legend is depicted as an innocent man, driven by powerful enemies to live outside society.
  4. vindicate
    show to be right by providing justification or proof
    In time, he finds a chance to revenge himself, and vindicate his essential innocence.
  5. prominence
    relative importance
    One difference, though, is that far more prominence is given to the hero's activities as a highway robber.
  6. magnanimous
    noble and generous in spirit
    He is a magnanimous robber, who is prepared to be very generous to people who need his help.
  7. distinctive
    of a feature that helps to identify a person or thing
    One more distinctive thing about the medieval Robin Hood: unlike his legendary predecessors, he is not a man of gentle birth.
  8. penchant
    a strong liking or preference
    In 1572, Thomas Wilson, a Crown servant and diplomat, wrote a dialogue in which one character commented that in England, highway robbers were likely to be admired for their courage, while another suggested that a penchant for robbery was one of the Englishman's besetting sins.
  9. extravagant
    recklessly wasteful
    William Harrison, writing about the large numbers of robberies that took place in Elizabethan England, said that these were usually committed by extravagant young gentlemen and underpaid servingmen.
  10. debunk
    expose while ridiculing
    In Falstaff and his associates, Shakespeare thoroughly debunked the idea that there is anything brave or admirable about committing robbery.
  11. spate
    a large number or amount or extent
    In 1651, James Hind, a former mounted robber turned Royalist soldier, was arrested and became the focus of a spate of publications.
  12. persistence
    the act of continuing or repeating
    At the end of the century, a passage in the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft demonstrates the persistence of the belief that the behaviour of English highway robbers proved the superiority of the English over the French.
  13. incidence
    the relative frequency of occurrence of something
    In the second half of the eighteenth century, the incidence of mounted robbery had begun to decline.
  14. nostalgic
    unhappy about being away and longing for familiar things
    By that time people were already beginning to think of the highwaymen as figures of nostalgic romance.
  15. incarnation
    a new personification of a familiar idea
    The Romantic Highwayman received his most famous incarnation in the very early twentieth century, in Alfred Noyes's narrative poem, The Highwayman.
Created on September 15, 2014 (updated September 15, 2014)

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