I love today's word from the OED

[conuly]

https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/64193431

And since I'm posting one dictionary-related link I may as well post another:

https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2021/11/08/i-am-begging-you-to-learn-how-dictionaries-work/

Comments

[agoodwinsmith]

Cromulent and copacetic were both words that made the rounds in my circle in grade 12. I always thought cromulent sounded like a merging of crumpet and succulent. Makes everything sound tasty. :)

[ioplokon]

Woah, can't believe small ball wasn't in there already, if only as a way to explain the origin of the expression inside baseball.

[pauamma]

Interesting. I got the impression - maybe in the Language Log discussion, as that's where I found out about it - that it meant "(of a neologism or recent coinage) having a self-evident meaning".

[kengr]

The bit about being told to look up words brought back an annoying memory.

I once got told to look up pneumonia in the dictionary. I was asking how to *spell* it as it was something I'd *heard, not seen written down.

As you can imagine this response was less than useful.

[deird1]

I'd agree with your definition.

[pauamma]

They wouldn't even give you the first 2-3 letters to help you find it?

[kengr]

Nope. I'm pretty sure it never even *occurred* to her that I'd have any problem.

Mom had a *really* bad case of "if it's obvious to me, it must be obvious to *you*"

[pauamma]

*facepalm* Yeah, I can see that not helping at all. (Tangentially, IYDMMA, are you referring to theory of mind, or some other form of expectations or assumptions mismatch?)

[kengr]

Basically, she didn't seem to "get" that I didn't know stuff she did, nor that "obvious" (to her) implications of rules she set weren't obvious to *me*.

Part of it might have been my being somewhere on the Autism spectrum (though this was decades before that was "discovered"). But some of it was just not stopping to think about the possibility that I didn't think like she did.

So there were gaps in explanations and all sorts of assumed context that I didn't have.

Which is kinda weird since she was a retired schoolteacher!

For a long time I was bad at math and her "solution" was to buy the workbook and answer book for the next grade and have me work on them over the summer.

She never bough the actual textbook, nor did she spend any time going over the problems with me.

The worst example was the time there were some problems where you substituted numbers for letters

SUMMER
-WINTER
--------

I hadn't a clue and when I told her that she just told me to replace the letters with numbers. It only took me a few seconds to realize that wouldn't work (as I said "the answer could be anything!") but she ignored that and I got punished when I didn't complete the problems.

Y'see, she didn't work thru the example with me and it hadn't occurred to here to specify two *critical* pieces of info.

1. that a given letter would always be the *same* number in a problem
2. That letters could have different values in different problems.

The first is what tripped me up, though the second might have been a stumbling block farther on.

So *to me* any letter could have any value and the problem was not solvable. Which was actually a fair bit of insight at my age)

Mind you, this is a *common* problem with adults, and not just in dealing with kids. They *assume* things. Especially, they assume things they know are also known to the people they are instructing and thus leave out critical info.

Or, as in many laws, they assume other people both think like they do, and that they have similar goals.

Thus we wind up with laws that don't work because people's goals are "don't get caught" or the like and thus, they look for ways around the law instead of ways to work *with* it.

[pauamma]

*wince* I hear you. (I was unable to make sense of long division until someone explained not how to do it, but why that apparently pointless sequence of piecemeal operations worked.)

[conuly]

In the US, at least, a lot of people were taught arithmetic by the "memorize the algorithm" method.

Which means they can't explain why it works, and often will get infuriated at the idea that newer curricula are making an active attempt to teach that part.

(These people also have bizarre ideas of how long it takes to teach things. "I learned long division in a week!" No, you didn't. There are 36 weeks in the school year. It took more than a week.)

[kengr]

Something that most teachers never knew helps a *lot* with both multiplication and division.

What they really are is repeated addition or subtraction respectively.

So 12 time 13 is actually "what do you get when you add 13 12s together.

Likewise, 159/12 is actually "how many times can you subtract 12 from 159"

Those explanations make many things much clearer.

My standard recomendations for folks who have trouble with math are Isaac Asimov's Realm of Numbers and follow that up with Realm of Algebra.

Alas, Asimov hit calculus and bounced, so there's no equivalent that I know of for higher match than algebra. But at least those two will get you through high scholl in most places.

[kengr]

I got lucky. In 6th grade (1966) they introduced The New Math and working with different number bases caught my attention.

Then the Asimov books I referred to in another comment got me thru algebra. and from there I could mostly handle it myself.

[silveradept]

That word is perfectly cromulent. And also, yes to the people who understand that dictionaries are supposed to be reflective of language in use, rather than as the official compendium of what is permissible language.

I've had a closer look at the quotes in that dictionary entry.

[pauamma]

The first, in 1996, is a transcript of the Simpsons episode itself with two occurences; one ("Edna: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield. Ms.Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.") is consistent with either meaning but the other ("Skinner: Yes, he's embiggened that role with his cromulent performance.") points to the dictionary's. Judging what I've read so far of
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.fan.douglas-adams/c/wdforr8uMfs/m/wU6Q3_6BDAAJ (in 2000), part of the second is just a reference to that episode, following someone else's use of "embiggen", so it's unclear and could be either so far, but I'll reread that whole thread to make sure. It's only with the 3rd (2007), 11 years after the initial coinage, that the intended meaning obviously settles on the dictionary's. That, to me, has all the hallmarks of a made-up meaningless word that was later imbued with meaning through consensus settling on one of the possible interpretations, and I find that utterly fascinating.

[pauamma]

Here too (late 1960s France, equivalent of US grade school - I think grade 3). That approach may have worked with others; I don't remember. I only know that for whatever reason, it didn't for me.

[pauamma]

The explanation I got (not from my teacher - it was an adult family friend) was along the lines of "It's the same steps as for multiplying numbers with more than one digit, but in reverse. Here's an example using the multiplication steps for (mumble); try reversing them."

[conuly]

It "works" superficially well because kids can memorize algorithms a heck of a lot faster than they can gain a total conceptual understanding of arithmetic - right up until they can't. But when they hit the wall, they hit it hard, and they have no way of going back and fixing their bad habits.

[pauamma]

In hindsight, that may very well be. I was taught how to extract square roots using pen and paper, but if I ever learned it, it didn't stiuck even for the maybe 2 years before I started using precomputed numerical tables and a slide rule.