Thursday, June 8, 2017

Booked: a Beacon for Wordsmiths

I try to read a good variety of book, both for my own good and also so I can provide reader advisory to kids at school, but I've never been good at reading the sports books. I've never read anything by Mike Lupica or Tim Green. I did manage to read Kwame Alexander's The Crossover, a novel in verse about basketball though. I decided since I liked it, I could also get through Booked.


Booked is another novel in verse, but this centers on soccer. I've never cared for soccer, but I like novels in verse, and Alexander create wonderful rhythms with his words. Speaking of words, Nick Hall, the soccer star protagonist, has one of the most extensive vocabularies I've seen in a children's/YA novel. This is due to his father, a linguistics professor, who makes him read the dictionary. Here's a list of all the words and terms I learned from reading this book:

verbomania: a crazed obsession with words

malapropism: the amusing and ludicrous misuse of a word, especially by confusion with one of similar sound

futsal: indoor soccer played with five players on each side

cachinnate: to laugh loudly

mewling: weak crying, whimpering

ragabash: worthless, rubbish

codswallop: something utterly senseless, nonsense

logorrhea: excessive use of words

limerence: the state of being infatuated with another person

flummoxed: bewildered or confused

onomatophobia: fear of hearing a certain word

farrow: a litter of pigs

sweven: dream or vision while sleeping

nutmeg: a soccer trick in which the ball is dribbled between the player's legs

rapprochement: reestablishment of harmonious relations

twain: two

callipygous: having beautiful buttocks

incompossible: incapable of coexisting

hellkite: an extremely cruel person

gadfly: an annoying person

wordbound: unable to find expression in words

yobbery: hooliganism

zazzy: stylish or flashy

His best friend Coby is even more obsessed with soccer. Coby happens to be half Singaporean and half Ghanaian, so score a point for diversity! #weneeddiversebooks

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