VOCABULARY LIST 8

• Abase: to reduce or lower, as in rank, office, reputation, or estimation; humble; degrade.
• Abdicate:  to renounce or relinquish a throne, right, power, claim, responsibility, or the like, especially in a formal manner.
• Abomination:  anything abominable; anything greatly disliked or abhorred.
• Brusque: abrupt in manner; blunt; rough.
• Saboteur:  a person who commits or practices sabotage.
• Debauchery: excessive indulgence in sensual pleasures; intemperance;  seduction from duty, allegiance, or virtue.
• Proliferate:  to increase in number or spread rapidly and often excessively.
• Anachronism:  something or someone that is not in its correct historical or chronological time, especially a thing or person that belongs to an earlier time.
• Nomenclature:  the names or terms comprising a set or system.
• Expurgate:  to purge or cleanse of moral offensiveness.
• Bellicose:  inclined or eager to fight; aggressively hostile; belligerent; pugnacious.
• Gauche:  lacking social grace, sensitivity, or acuteness; awkward; crude; tactless.
• Rapacious:  given to seizing for plunder or the satisfaction of greed; greedy.
• Paradox:  a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.
• Conundrum: anything that puzzles.
• Anomaly: an odd, peculiar, or strange condition, situation, quality, etc; an incongruity or inconsistency.   
• Ephemeral:  lasting a very short time; short-lived; transitory.
• Rancorous:  showing malicious resentfulness or hostility; spiteful.
• Churlish:  like a churl; boorish; rude; peasant-like.
• Precipitous:  of the nature of or characterized by precipices (steepness).

Hamlet is quite the unique character.  In fact, he is something of an anomaly for displaying so many split-personalities that is often actually seen in today's society.  Already thinking of the incest of his new parentage as an abomination, Hamlet's level of disgust over his uncle Claudius quickly proliferates into something much more rancorous after the discovery of his father's murder.  After seeing the name of the thrown abased from a Hyperion to a Satyr and seeing the gauche, new king glut himself in his own debaucheries, Hamlet's precipitous state of mind declines into an even further conundrum, where he promises the ghost of his father to avenge his death.  Whether his vengeance take place in the form of abdicating his uncle from the thrown or expurgating his sins, Hamlet turns into a bellicose and almost churlish saboteur in the kingdom.  He visits his love, Ophelia, in a brusque manner which only sets things on a more dramatic scale, since the nomenclature of the hierarchy of the kingdom would have it that her father is the adviser to the king himself.  Not to mention that throughout the play, Hamlet displays ephemeral mood-swings that trouble the others around him, especially since the ghost of King Hamlet has haunted his son with ringing paradoxes of his death.  With King Claudius serving as a metaphorical anachronism as a king, it will be interesting to see how Hamlet deals with the situation.

DEAR OPHELIA

Dear Ophelia,

You, as the female presence of your family, should not let the male authorities abase your love for another.  In fact, your father and brother should be known as saboteurs of true love.  If your odd position does not compare to the love you have for this prince, then simply go out with him, but if you don't love him, then don't try for him.  It is all so simple.  Do not make it harder than it needs to be.

LITERARY FICTION AND EMPATHY

If you were to meet me an hour ago and ask me if reading fiction matters, I would have chuckled to myself with a nonchalant attitude and replied with, "No," but an online article titled "For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov" by Pam Belluck changed my opinion.  Now, my opinion was not influenced by their entitlement (we've already been through this), but once the psychological science departments got involved with a little experimentation, the article grabbed my attention.

Due to these new scientific findings, it is now thought to be recommended to read some literary fiction before any type of social interactions.  Although the reading time won't necessarily make you any less awkward to be around, it can improve ones understandings of body language and character in the real world.  The fact that literary fiction forces its readers to imagine the characters that are described in every novel and base an opinion of those characters through chains of events makes this style of reading ultimately more culturally insightful than other forms of literature.

Hamlet, for example, contains various soliloquies where readers must imagine the mood, the tone, the plot, etc. from a speech that contains very little detail and a ton of indirection.  If you were to read a soliloquy from Hamlet then converse with a friend about their problems, studies have shown that you would show much more empathy and mindfulness of body language than you would have if you did not read before engaging in conversation, meaning that a little bit of literary fiction could make you the psychiatrist of the family -- maybe not that far.

I had always told myself that it would take scientific proof for me to want to read more often, and, of course, science had to go there.  From the words of novelist Louise Erdrich, "This is why I love science."

GREEN EGGS AND HAMLET

A.) I have no idea what Hamlet is about, but I'm sure I'm about to find out soon enough.

B.) I know enough about Shakespeare to know that he wrote Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, and he's fond of iambic pentameter, but that's it.

C.)  I feel as though students not only frown to Shakespeare, but they frown to any piece of literature that requires thought and brainpower to simply understand what in the world is going on in the story.  Shakespeare isn't exactly separate from other olden authors, and I'm sure you can ask any high school student if they'd rather read Essays of Michel de Montaigne or Hamlet, and most (if not all) would respond with Hamlet.

D.)  We could always act out the play and get ourselves on Broadway, or not.  Either way, it'll be something different.

I like how we can incorporate a Dr. Seuss allusion into Hamlet.  The theme of "don't knock it until you try it" is fairly accurate when discussing upcoming assignments on Shakespeare.

IF I JUST HAD MORE TIME

What's your take on midterm examinations?  I, unlike most students, am indifferent to cumulative-based testing, because it does help to retain the knowledge one has gained over a certain time-span, but my most recent midterm in my AP English Literature and Composition class caught me by surprise.  With the given that Dr. Preston takes advantage of the freedom of concocting his vocabulary tests in whichever fashion he feels, I should have known to better prepare myself.  If only I had a little more time, I would have been a master at vocabulary, and I would have been able to incorporate them into an impromptu essay.  Plus, I strictly remember Dr. Preston hinting that "we should be able to use these words in a sentence," but given my naive nature, I entrusted him to make the midterm a little easier than it was.  For the future, it would be helpful for me to train myself to not only recognize the big words when I see them written down, but to also utilize the new vocabulary in my everyday language.  The next time I'm asked to recite vocabulary words and definitions from memory, I'd hopefully be able to remember the words that I was asked to learn in the first place...

THE COMPARISONS TALE

In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's tone re-occurs to be satirical.  In the miller's tale, a carpenter was tricked into some crazy scheme by a man who was sleeping with his wife.  Chaucer used adultery to ironically satire the sin of lying.  This theme and tone were seen in the physician's tale, where a judge talked badly about a knight's daughter, which forced the knight to murder his daughter since nothing was proven, and his reputation was damaged.  By believing the lie that was spread by a character within their respective tales, the carpenter and the knight both suffered something great while goofy yet depressing outcomes became of the other characters who participated.

TALE OF A CANTERBURY TALE

THE PHYSICIAN:

Summary:

There was a maiden named Virginia who was born to a knight named Virginius.  Virginia was extremely beautiful and was coveted by the judge of the town named Apius.  Apius plotted to get Virginia for himself by claiming in the court of justice that Virginia belonged to him and not Virginius.  Since Virginius could not do anything, he killed his daughter out of love, and the town imprisoned Apius and hung his partner.

1.)   Chaucer described the maiden's beauty by referring to how nature had painted her the way she is.

(Refer to Eli Esparza, Miranda Nillo, Danny Luu, and Lesther Valenzuela's blogs for the rest of the indirect characterizations.)

2.)  Chaucer's purpose in telling this tale lies at the end with the statement, "Forsake sin or for sin you'll be forsaken."  With the faulty errors of our ways serving as the theme of this tale, Chaucer clearly writes a story of a man who pays for his sins, which sends the message to his readers that sin will always find you out.