I’ve been reading The
Hobbit with my oldest two sons. It’s uniquely enjoyable with each one for
different reasons. Jacob, my oldest, is at the age where he can read a
paragraph or a page to me, but still encounters quite a few words which are new
to him. We reached the part in the book where Bilbo walks down the secret
tunnel into the heart of the Lonely Mountain to face the dragon Smaug for the
second time, while the troop of dwarves who have traveled with him hang back in
the distance, their usual practice. The dragon knows, or guesses, where the
dwarves are and refers to their “skulking” in the shadows.
I knew that “skulking” was a new word for Jacob.
After he sounded it out and read it, I asked him what he thought it meant. I
chose to use an approach to exploring meaning called “fittingness,” which I
first encountered in the writings of Nicholas Wolterstorff.[i]
It goes something like this: many things in this world seem to have a natural
relationship to one another, even though we can’t objectively quantify that
relationship. We might say that blue is sad, red is angry, and yellow is happy.
Of course, that’s ridiculous. Colors are merely reflections of light and have
no direct relationship to emotions. Yet, the descriptions I listed “fit” with
one another, don’t they? They fit together so well that corporations spend
fortunes on attaching their brands to specific colors to inspire feelings and
behavior. So, I told Jacob that “skulking” is one of those wonderful words in
life that sounds like what it means. What does “skulking” sound like? Is it
happy or sad? Confident or nervous? Open or secret? Light or dark? Is it
trustworthy or tricky? Jacob struggled with this a little. That’s not
surprising, it’s a rather intuitive and circuitous way to get at meaning, but
ultimately he decided that “skulking” was being dark, sad, nervous, tricky, and
secretive (yes, he had a little help from his father).
Wolterstorff’s “fittingness” is a fun way to get kids
to venture out and take a stab at unfamiliar words, but there is a better way,
one I wish I had used with Jacob in this instance. Michael Polanyi describes it
like this, “in order to analyse the use of a descriptive term we must use it
for the purpose of contemplating its subject matter, and an analysis of this
contemplation will inevitably extend to the contemplated object.[ii]”
The weak point in my exploration of “skulking” with Jacob was that I focused
his efforts of understanding on the word itself, when Smaug used the word to
describe the actions of others. Our journey, fun as it was, required a good bit
of guesswork and a few intuitive leaps. It may have been a nice mental exercise,
but discovering the definition of “skulking” shouldn’t have been that hard: it
was plain as day, or at least plain as those sad, nervous, tricky, and
secretive dwarves. Perhaps the best way to define “skulking” was to ask Jacob
who Smaug was referring to when he used the word, and what they were doing that
caused him to use it. The dwarves were afraid and hiding in the shadows, happily
allowing a little hobbit to do their dangerous work for them. They were
“skulking.” To take the conversation to the next level, I could have asked what
Smaug hoped to gain in the conversation. He was trying, and succeeding, to sow
seeds of mistrust between Bilbo and his dwarf friends. Smaug was describing the
dwarves as untrustworthy, and “skulking” is not a term that describes those we
trust.
In summary, I offer two ways help children explore
new vocabulary beyond simply telling them the meaning of a word:
1.
“Fittingness” What does the word sound like?
What does it feel like? This is something of an obtuse and roundabout way to
get to the meaning of a word, but it requires a good bit of imagination and
creativity. Probably one best used with close adult guidance and best left for
fun explorations at home.
2. “Subject
analysis” What is the word referring to, what is it talking about? What is that
thing doing? If your child can describe the subject of the word, he’s probably
got the word’s meaning as well. It’s just a matter of making the connection.
One of the benefits of
reading Tolkein with five and seven year-olds is that I can be confident it won’t
be long until we have the chance to explore the meaning of an unfamiliar word
again. Until then, good luck and good parenting.
