Unpacking the Meaning of Appreciation
Appreciation. Let’s talk about the word, “appreciation.” By the time this blog post is done, you’re going to appreciate that word in whole new way.
I love words – the sounds, the nuances, the etymology! (Did you know that the word “school” with reference to a group of fish has no linguistic relationship to the education term with the same spelling? The former is German and Dutch in origin, meaning “group” – while the latter is from Greek and related to learning). If a love of words can be genetic, I picked it up from both sides of my genealogy, and especially from my maternal grandfather, Jack. If it’s nurture rather than nature, then it must be a result of growing up in a home where I saw my mother read two, three, even four books in a week. My father was an English major at UCLA, before entering the medical profession. He isn’t quite the voracious reader my mother is (who could be?), but he has a fondness for poetry and songs, and often used to clip word games and puzzles to share with me.
Phil Holmes, with me at our 20-year class reunion (2007)My tenth-grade English teacher, Phil Holmes, made the love of words into more of a virtue by teaching me to pay closer attention to every word in my reading and writing. I entered his class in 1984, and among our first assignments was to look up a word from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” in the Oxford English Dictionary. I discovered that “stout” could mean much more than I thought, and I gained some insights into the evolution of
I love words – the sounds, the nuances, the etymology! (Did you know that the word “school” with reference to a group of fish has no linguistic relationship to the education term with the same spelling? The former is German and Dutch in origin, meaning “group” – while the latter is from Greek and related to learning). If a love of words can be genetic, I picked it up from both sides of my genealogy, and especially from my maternal grandfather, Jack. If it’s nurture rather than nature, then it must be a result of growing up in a home where I saw my mother read two, three, even four books in a week. My father was an English major at UCLA, before entering the medical profession. He isn’t quite the voracious reader my mother is (who could be?), but he has a fondness for poetry and songs, and often used to clip word games and puzzles to share with me.
Phil Holmes, with me at our 20-year class reunion (2007)
