A Vocabulary (and History) Lesson

I teach college English--writing, mostly. Because it's college English, I almost never spend any direct instruction time on vocabulary. My students do develop their vocabulary in my classes, but mostly by doing a lot of reading and writing.

I do have one vocabulary lesson, however, which I will give if they ask and aren't satisfied with "read a lot; write a lot." It is this: learn affixes. Affixes are the bits we stick at the beginnings and ends of words to modify their meaning--in other words, prefixes and suffixes. If you learn affixes, your vocabulary increases logarithmically.

The word I most often use to illustrate affixes is "antidisestablismentarianism." Not only does it use a lot of affixes, it's also recognizable and generally regarded as a bit silly, which makes the lesson more memorable.

So I write the word on the board and ask my students to help me break it down. First, we identify the root ("establish") and note that it is a verb. Then we work our way outwards, identifying the affixes and their meanings, until they can successfully decode the word. I'll give you a moment now to try it yourself; the answer is after the break.

Image: A stack of LEGO blocks with the parts of the word
"antidisestablishmentarianism" written on them. CC0 Public Domain.

Once my students work out that antidisestablismentarianism basically means conservative, we all have a laugh about it. Then I tell a story about a time when I was a grad student and I threw a Theory (the capital T is important) textbook across the room because the authors used "antidisestablismentarian" in a sentence, unironically, and not just for making a point about English.

But today the lesson didn't end there, because a student said, "wait, I think I read somewhere that it has a specific meaning, something to do with separation of church and state." I was unaware of this, and said so. But I also said it was plausible, since silly-seeming words often have a specific meaning and are useful in a particular context--a reason for being other than merely sounding smart. We looked it up, and she was right.

"Antidisestablishmentarianism" goes back to 19th-century British political discourse about whether or not to separate the Church of England from the British government--to stop having a state religion. In other words, there were those who felt that Britain should have no establishment of religion, and they were called "disestablishmentarians" because the establishment of religion was already in place. Those who opposed them were quite logically called "antidisestablishmentarians," and their political movement "antidisestablishmentarianism." "Conservative" in that context would have been less clear, not more.

Not only did my students and I all learn something together today, but we also came away with this pair of gems, supplied by two students:

"Making up words in English is a lot like playing with LEGO." "Yeah, and deciphering words in English is like stepping on LEGO."