As my grandmother and I searched the campus for my dorm a very kind person approached us and asked, "Do yuns need some help?" Yuns? Who? Now my 'Yaya' (Grandma in Greek, although she's Italian, French and German) speaks 'Brooklynese' as she affectionately calls it, so 'yous' was always a familiar term to me. We quickly determined that 'yuns' were really 'yous' as in the two of you, Yaya and I. This was turning into a real learning experience and I hadn't stepped foot in an undergraduate class yet!
Over the course of four years I learned many alternate versions of words I assumed had no synonyms. In fact, my time spent in the Ohio Valley is what sparked my interest in synonyms. Granted, much of my newly acquired vocabulary only appears in UrbanDictionary.com but I gained much more than word knowledge. I adopted another culture, and for the first time it happened to be an actual 'American' culture, if that exists. I was so familiar with 'foreign' cultures that it never occurred to me that the United States had many native diverse cultures! Please forgive my ignorance but as I stated earlier, I was only seventeen and not well traveled.
I haven't lived in the Ohio Valley for many years now but the culture is a tremendous part of who I am today. I now feel the pain of industrial communities who lose everything when a mill closes. I witnessed firsthand how a culture begins to become extinct. And I wept with these people and for these people because I was now one of them. I recently visited my alma mater with my husband and children. In my opinion, it was the best vacation we've ever taken because I was finally able to share a huge part of myself with my family. We toured the ruins of the steel mills. We experienced a culture that is so foreign to us and yet ironically so American. I could write endless blogs about my time living in The Ohio Valley but I'll refrain from doing so because some cherished memories are meant to be kept in your heart.
Vocabulary:
assumed- (adj) taken for granted; supposed
thrive - (verb) to prosper; be fortunate or successful
mere- (adj) being nothing more nor better than
alternate- (adj) reciprocal; mutual
acquired- (verb) to gain for oneself through one's actions or efforts
occurred- (verb) to suggest itself in thought; come to
ignorance-(noun) lack of knowledge, learning, information, etc.
tremendous- (adj) extraordinarily great in size, amount, or intensity
extinct- (adj) no longer in existence; that has ended or died out
refrain- (verb) to abstain from an impulse to say or do something
Fill in the blanks with the correct vocabulary words:
Since the steel mills have closed The Ohio Valley has failed to ___________.
Sushi is an ____________ taste.
The ___________ route is more scenic.
It never _____________ to her that she could take summer classes to graduate sooner.
It's best to ______________ from speaking your mind when angry.
Don't _____________ you have an agreement unless it's on paper.
He was a ____________ toddler when he composed his first piece of music.
Racism is fueled by ______________.
Piping plovers are a species of birds that are going ________________ on long island.
Conservationists have gone to ___________________ lengths to preserve the piping plovers.
Grammar Point: Verb Tense
The tense of a verb tells us when the action happened--present, past, or future. We rely on the past tense to show that an action has already been completed. In order to change a regular verb from the present tense to the past tense we add the ending -ed. Can you find examples of regular verbs in the past tense in the passage above? Write three sentences about what you did last night. Make sure your verbs are in the past tense to show the actions already happened.
No comments:
Post a Comment