Because I don’t think Jeff and I have enough books in our house, I brought another big box of books home with me the last time we went back to Pittsburgh and Ohio. Oops. A lot of them are headed into my classroom library–The Secret Garden, Farenheit 451, a bunch of VC Andrews and Joan Lowery Nixon, some R.L. Stine–but some I couldn’t bear to imagine having ninth graders touch, take, and possibly lose. One such book is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi. This was the biggest book in the world to me when I read it in fifth grade. And I have a distinct memory of circling all the words I didn’t know and writing them down in small handwriting on a small piece of paper. Unfortunately, that small piece of paper is gone. But the pencil circles are still there. (Click the picture to see it bigger, over at Flickr.)
In my mind, six to eight words were circled per page throughout the entire book. Not so much–it’s more like just for chapter 8. Not even all of chapter 8 now that I’ve looked again.
Some of my selections I find sweet–grievous, wont, contradict. I have, on various other pages, also circled: moreover, standoffish, naught, punctillious, and fatigued. To imagine I once didn’t know such words that I now consider so common.
Other words are still unknown to me: what is a futtock shroud? what does it mean to “holystone” a deck? what’s a clewgarnet? But I ask you, where if not this blog will I ever investigate this matter more fully than I did as a fifth grader. (It should be known that I never did look these words up. I just circled them and wrote them down). Excuse me while I utilize google, etc.
OK, so futtock shrouds appear to be the rope riggings on sailboats that let people climb onto the “top”. Umm, read the wikipedia entry if you want something clearer, because I can’t help you. If you holystone a deck, you scrub it with a holystone, which is a block of soft sandstone. Finally, a clewgarnet is a rope that holds the bottom of the main sail to something or other in the boat.
Who is this Avi person to put such complicated words in a children’s book! I love him!
