“She mentions often in the book worrying that she was outmatched intellectually by classmates and colleagues, but confident that she could overcome any deficit by buckling down, working harder, studying longer.

“I came to accept during my freshman year that many of the gaps in my knowledge and understanding were simply limits of class and cultural background, not lack of aptitude or application as I’d feared,” she writes. “I honestly felt no envy or resentment, only astonishment at how much of a world there was out there and how much of it others already knew. The agenda for self-cultivation that had been set for my classmates by their teachers and parents was something I’d have to develop for myself.”

After disappointing grades her freshman year at Princeton, Sotomayor bought grammar books and vocabulary texts and practiced each lunch hour at her summer job. She eventually flourished, winning Princeton’s top academic prize and graduating with highest honors, summa cum laude. ”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sotomayor-tells-life-story-shaped-by-disease-overcoming-adversity/2013/01/13/17e75fd2-5b3a-11e2-9fa9-5fbdc9530eb9_story.html?tid=ts_carousel

Teacher: Welcome, everyone. I thought we could spend this first week of school discussing the book you were assigned to read over the summer.

“The Red Badge Of Courage.” Anyone care to tell me some of its themes?

Anyone? (no response)

Okay, let’s back up a bit. Who wants to tell me what it’s about?

(silence)

How about the name of the main character? The name of the author? The color of the book jacket? (Peter raises his hand.)

Yes, Peter?

Peter: I think it was light blue.

The last panel shows Peter talking to his mother at home.

Peter: Well, the good news is I’m currently the top student in my English class?

Mother: And the bad news?

When I first saw this comic a few years ago I thought it was good enough to save. Now when I look at it again, it occurs to me that it’s a good example of the importance of reading between the lines, of background knowledge. A person would need only a very limited vocabulary of English to read every sentence with complete understanding, at least on the word or sentence level. But one might do that and completely miss the meaning, and therefore the humor, on a higher level, perhaps the paragraph level.

This suggests to me that perhaps the concept of “vocabulary of ideas” is important, or the “vocabulary of expectations” or the “vocabulary of cultural norms, or the “vocabulary of . . . . . . “. To get the humor of this comic strip one would have to be familiar with the culture it represents, the subtle foibles of the culture, not just the basic facts.

Vocabulary of words is important, obviously, but I wonder if that is only one instance of what we might think of as vocabularies.

Yes, this is pretty much a restatement of what E. D. Hirsch has been telling us for many years. Once again, knowledge is power.

Sum, es, est, sumus, estis, sunt. Almost fifty years later I can still conjugate Latin verbs in my sleep. My vocabulary transfer from Latin to English also remains, but to what degree might be challenging to measure.