Arcadia Public Library

From polished professionals to slothful slackers,cover a wide range of words to describe work ethic. Dig into the nuances that separate similar words like tenacious and pertinacious. Expand your knowledge of the Latin root fac (to make or do) to include alternate spellings and a useful suffix.

Step back in time and learn about words inspired by the great men, women, and places of literature and history. English is replete with a host of lively eponyms, such as bloomers, sideburns, and sandwich. Learn about the fascinating people and stories behind eight excellent eponyms.

Toss aside the rote memorization of childhood and explore the cognitive science behind the five core principles of effective vocabulary learning: definition, context, connections, morphology, and semantic chunking. Through interactive examples, see how you can improve your ability to remember the definition of a new word or a long list of familiar terms.

Your final cultural stop around France is the home. Tour the house to uncover the vocabulary of different rooms and their functions, as well as some regional differences in architecture. Then delve into a few "tricky translations" where you must choose the right word for the right situation.

Finally, learn a new word to describe partisan politics or views. Then, go beyond bang and shush and add some more sophisticated onomatopoeic words to your repertoire. Finally, a fun pop quiz helps you review some of the words you've learned so far.

Continue your adventure by rounding out your skills to tell and follow a story. A new verb tense - the pluperfect - will help you tell personal stories, show the link between past and present events, and forge a connection with another person. Practice listening, reading and telling stories.

Travel back in time for some delicious words that Professor Flanigan believes deserve to be brought back to common usage. Then, explore neologisms, or new words that are coming into English every day, like meme, boson, and muggle.

Over the years, linguists and language scholars have organized and categorized words in a number of different ways. Explore many of these linguistic categories, including spoonerisms, phrases that give us a unique insight into how our minds plan out our speech.

Study the fascinating stories behind words that describe how we speak - from the laconic Spartans to the pithy Jedi master to the loquacious ventriloquist. At the end, return to Greece for the story behind a word inspired by the Athenian orator Demosthenes and his opinions about King.

Go beyond Latin to learn a word for inexperience that has its roots in Old English. Distinguish between people who are innocent and naive, new to a skill, or pretending to know more than they do. Then, turn to words for endings, and learn why we say "immortal," and not "inmortal."