HOW TO BUILD A BETTER VOCABULARY

This approaches the subject of vocabulary building in a different way from S.S. Smith's Double Your Vocabulary (Crowell- 1947), which made almost a game of adding new words. This is an informal but perhaps more scientific approach, fundamentally via the new words encountered in ordinary media,- radio, newspapers, etc., they approach the ways in which such words can becomes one's own. The importance of association of understanding meanings in context, of learning to break words down into units, of recognizing word families, roots, prefixes, suffixes, attachable and detachable parts of words, all the ways in which words grow and change. There's anecdote and history and legend here. There are tricks of remembering. There are tests and word lists. There's a section on distinctions in meaning, on mispronunciation, on slang and proper names and mythology as related to words and meanings. And there's a final section on new words of the atomic age-I'm perhaps not a good judge of such books, for I like anything to do with words!