Vocabulary Blog

Between my full-time job, studying for the GRE, and wasting time on the Internet, I have a difficult time finding time to read.  And by read I’m not talking about dumbed-down blogs and celebrity news, I’m talking about real literature–books–those things people used to read in high school when they couldn’t find Cliffs Notes.

The problem with not reading is that it can severely limit one’s vocabulary.  Standardized tests, for better or for worse, reward a good vocabulary.  Of course it is possible to memorize a bunch of words long enough to get a reasonable score on the GRE or SAT, but I’d rather have a practical knowledge of words, not a bookish knowledge.  I want to be able to use fancy GRE words the same way I would use a curse words when hitting my thumb with a hammer.  Words should flow from my subconscious without me having to “look” them up in my mind’s dictionary.

That’s the purpose of this blog.  By writing about words, I hope to save those words to the same part of my brain as those curse words.

The first word I’m going to write about I chose because it fits the theme of this post. 

Incipient- beginning, starting, coming into existence

The Latin root of incipient is related to the word inception, which I hope will help me to remember it.

Here’s an excerpt Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor.

Night was my usual time for correcting devoirs, and my own room the usual scene of such task–task most onerous hitherto; and it seemed strange to me to feel rising within me an incipient sense of interest, as I snuffed the candle and addressed myself to the perusal of the poor teacher’s manuscript.