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Words can make us laugh, cry, go to war , fall in love. Rudyard Kipling called words the most powerful drug to mankind. If they are, I’m a hopeless addict, and I hope to get you hooked, too! Whether you’re still in school or you head up a corporation, the better command you have on words, the better chance of you saying exactly what you mean, of understanding what others mean, and of getting what you want in the world. English is the richest language with the largest vocabulary on earth. Over 1,000,000 words! You can express shades of meanings that aren’t even possible in any other language. (For example, you can differentiate between “sky” and “heaven.” The french, Italians, and Spanish cannot. Yet the average adult has a vocabulary of only 30,000 to 60,000 words. Imagine what we are missing! Here are 5 pointers that help me learn and remember whole families of words at a time. They may not look easy and won’t be at first. But if you stick with them, you’ll find they work! You can often get at least a part of a word’s meaning just from how it is used in a sentence. That’s why it is so important to read as much as you can—different kinds of magazines, books, newspapers, you don’t normally read. The more you expose yourself to new words, the more words you pick up just by seeing how they are used. For instance, say you run across the word “manacle”: “The manacle had been on John’s wrist for 30 years. Only one person has the key, his wife.” You have a good idea of what “manacles” are—just from the context of the sentence. But let’s find out what the word exactly means and where it came from. The only way to do this, and to build an extensive vocabulary fast, is to go to the dictionary. (How lucky! You can—Shakespeare couldn’t. There wasn’t an English dictionary in his day!) So you could go to the dictionary. (NOTE: Don’t let dictionary abbreviations put you off. The font tells you what they mean, and even has a guide to pronunciations. 2. Look it up. Here’s the definition for “manacles” in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: man·a·cle (man’e,kel) n. usually plural. 2. Anything that confines or restrains. The first definition fits here: A device for confining the hands, usually consisting of two metal rings that are fastened around the wrists and joined by a metal chain; a handcuff. Well, that’s what you thought it meant. But what’s the idea behind the word? What are its roots? To really understand the word, you need to know. Here’s where the detective work—and the fun—begins. 3. Dig the meanings out by the roots. The root is the basic part of the word—its heritage, its origin. (Most of our roots come from Latin and Greek words, at least 2,000 years old, which comes from even older Indo-European tongues!) learning the roots: That’s why learning the roots is the important part of the dictionary. Notice the root of “manacle” is “manus” (Latin), meaning “hand.” Well, that makes sense. Now other words with this root, man, starts to make sense, too. Take a manual—something done “by hands” (manual labor), or a “handbook.” And manage—”handle” something (as a manager). When you manufacture something, you “make it by hand” (in its original meaning). And when you finish your first novel, your publisher will see your originally “handwritten” manuscript. Imagine a whole new world of words opening up—just from one simple root! The root gives the basic clue to the meaning of a word. But there’s another important clue that runs a close second—the prefix. 4. Get the powerful prefixes under the belt. A prefix is the part that’s sometimes attached to the front of a word. Like well-prefix! There aren’t 100 many less than 100 major prefixes, and you’ll learn them in no time at all just by becoming more aware of the meanings of the words you already know. Here are a few. (some of the “how-to” vocabulary-building books will give you the other.) PREFIX (LIKE) MEANING EXAMPLES (Literal sense) com., con., co., cog. say, syn. with, very, together conform (form with) sympathy (feeling with) in., im., il., ir. an not, without innocent (not wicked) incorrect (not correct) anti against against antidote (give against) counter against contradict (speak against)

What is poetry? And why has it been around so long? Many have suspected that it was invented as a school subject because you have to take exams on it. But this is not why poetry is or why it is still around. That’s not what it feels like either. When you really feel it, a new part of you happens, or an old part is renewed, with surprise and delight at being what it is. Where poetry is coming from. From the beginning, man has known that words and things, words and actions, words and feelings go together and that they can go together in a thousand different ways, according to who is using them. Some ways go shallow and some go deep. Your connections with other imaginations. The first thing to understand about poetry is that it comes from outside you, in books or in words, but for it to live, something from within you must come to it, meet it, complete it. Your response with your own mind and body and memory and emotions gives the poem its ability to work its magic; if you give to it, it will give you and give plenty. When you read, don’t let the poet write down to you; read up to him. Reach for him with your gut out, and the heart and the muscles will come to it, too. “The things around us-like water, trees, cloud, the sun belongs to us all. How you see them can enhance my way of seeing them…and just the other way around!” Which sun? Whose stars? The sun is new every day, the ancient philosopher Heraclitus said. The sun of poetry is new every day, too, because it is seen in different ways by different people who have lived under it, lived with it, responded to it. Their lives are different from yours, but by means of the special spell that poetry brings to the sun, everybody’s sun—yours too, you can come into possession of many suns: as many as men and women have ever been able to imagine. Poetry makes possible the deepest kind of possession of the world The most beautiful constellation in the winter sky is Orion, which ancient poets thought looked like a hunter, up there, moving across the heaven with his dogs sirus. What is this hunter made out of stars hunting for?