KW: Um. We're interested in the kinds of strategies that you use to figure out the meaning of a word that you've never seen before. So here is a set of texts and each page um comes out of a different article um in a magazine or a book. And each text or passage includes one or more instances of the um the target word that we are interested in today, and that word is schmalion [she laughs]. Um, What we're looking for here is not a synonym for schmalion, but, however, a rich um definition that would resemble one that you'd find in a dictionary. So you are not looking for synonyms but more of a sense of the whole concept. So what I'd like you to do is think out loud about the possible meanings of schmalion and try to show me when you're talking what words, other words, in the passage you are referencing, what words you are finding the most helpful. Sort of give me a window into your mind about how you are solving the problem. And, um, if I feel like you are not saying enough, then I'll just have you tell me more. Okay, you can read this to yourself, and when you get to the bottom of the paragraph, um, let's stop and talk about it.

[There is quiet for about 30 seconds, then there is an unintelligible exchange between participants; possibly to clarify how the group was going to collaborate on completing the protocol]

KW: Initially, when I've done it with kids, we've done it [meaning think aloud] at the end of reading it, but how we are going to do it when we are all together...[she fades out uncertainly. The tape is turned off and on as the team talks about procedures]

WR It's not on-line [processing] now because if we saw the real word, we would see it began with "t" but that wouldn't give us any clue as to what it meant.

BM But it makes a difference now.

WR It makes a difference now because we're looking for a synonym but, um, uh.

BM [overlapping] I'll ignore that part.

WR [overlapping] Yeah.

MWK [overlapping] I used a language part earlier. I mean, I used, uh, you know. I won't say, but it's preceded by an "a" or an "an." Okay? Which tells you what it can be and what it can't be.

BM Right.

MWK The first letter.

BM Yeah.

MWK So I mean, you do...I think it is not unusual to pay attention to those, so yeah, that you should write down.

BM Okay.

MWK Okay. [pause] Unfortunately, I wasn't smart enough to figure out that that's a cue. Now I go back and look [unclear word]

BM [laughs. Tape is turned off then on again?]

WR Repeat what I?

MWK Yes, please [general laughter].

WR So my, my overall comments are that I have no idea what the word means. I'm sure that when I - I'm not sure - but its quite likely when I hear it that I'm going to say, "Oh, of course!" You know? "Why didn't I think of that?" Um, my, my overall confidence is, [pause] I think I have a rough idea of what it means. If, if I saw it again in another passage, I say, "Yeah, I think I know what that means," but I wouldn't feel comfortable using the word at all. Um...The other thing I think, to get back to what you were asking before about should knowing that this is just a nonsense word for some real word and seeing all those t's in that one example, should we think that the real word begins with a t? I, I think another reason that, um, why we shouldn't go that way is imagine that you are a speaker of English as a second language and that this is just a really obscure word or

BM But

WR Or that this is in some foreign language that, you know, and you are trying to figure out what this word means and you wouldn't necessarily expect it to be something else.

BM Part of the reason I asked that, though, is because of the intention of the author. In each passage I tried to, I tried to get a suspicion of what the intention of the author was, because, you know, that, that pointed out to me that the intention of that passage wasn't necessarily to tell me what this person was like when they drank tequila,

WR Right.

BM but to get this word game, and then when I looked at the bottom, I see word game. I'm like, well, this passage is useless to me as far as finding out what this word means. It's like a little check for a hypothesis, a tiny check.

WR So why don't we go around the room and, and each person go through their whole chain of thinking.

MWK The whole chain?

WR Yeah.

MWK Brian, from one through five.

BM I'll go quick.

WR [overlapping] Well, what we could

MWK No, it's [unclear]. This probably makes more sense because then we hear one person's whole chain of thinking.

WR [overlapping] Yes, right.

BM Okay.

MWK Try not to laugh.

BM Yeah, really. I'll go first. What I did was I read the thing real quickly, you know, and I thought does, do I need to know, I asked this every passage, "do I need to know the word to understand it? The sentence?" And "do I need to know the word to understand - [corrects himself] that sentence to understand the passage?" I found that generally I didn't need that in any of the passages

KW: Right.

BM to understand it. But that doesn't matter. And so what I did first as I'm reading it, I'm thinking Romania, uh, it's always, it seems to be always prior knowledge that I was going to, or whatever you want to call that now. Um, you know, Romania is an eastern-block country, recently it's probably run down, things are shabby, so I started to use the word like shabby and run down, and I tested that hypothesis to see if it fits. And I looked at "but" - the word "but" - "schmalion but solicitous," "schmalion but comfortably upholstered."

KW: Uh-ohh.

BM So it's something that doesn't necessarily go with it, like you'd say "pure and good hearted." I wouldn't say "pure but evil hearted" as a...you know, there is some kind of a absent [??] thing, so I used that to form my thing, and the rest of it was just interesting. I might want to go to Romania right now. [quiet laughter] So, uh, my hypothesis is uh, is uh, that it's shabby or rundown, some word like that. Not up to snuff, not up to the standards. Something like that. And so, uh, that kind of helped me uh, comprehend, so I went to passage two, and I asked the same standard questions, "Do I need to know this?" blah blah blah. And I'm reading this, and I know that um, uh, ancient Wales in the sixth century, was, um, that was pretty much the height of their culture, and um, so I substituted my hypothesis as run down, and going with the author's intention, he is trying to place this man in juxtaposition again - I'm kind of probably going by opposites a lot - juxtaposition to the past. He's, uh, the past Wales to /po-yiss/? /Po-wees/? Do you know how to pronounce it? /Po-wiss/? /Powiss/? I think it's /Po-wiss/, the y is pronounced like a "u". Powys was uh, worshipped the past or more or less, but he is still a member of the modern times which to him are tainted, so therefore he's tainted, to my shabby, run down, not up to standards works here still. Okay, and then I went to the third one and got all screwed up by the alliteration and, and, I still tried to do a little check with um, with um, the word to see if it would fit, and both of them would fit, but this seems to be a different part of speech here. I started to check the grammar again. It's not really, it's not the same part of speech, it seems to me, as it was in the other ones. In the other ones it was something like a predicate adjective, and here it is...something else.

WR It's gotta be a noun.

BM A noun here, but it wasn't before. And that kind of screwed me up as to what the word meant. But, you know, it works; I could take, instead of shabby, I could say shabbiness or run-downedness, or something like that. And then passage four, um, uh, I asked the standard questions that I always ask. Um, and then I looked at the one part of the sentence where he talks in this thing in the parenthesis while noting how hard it is to write a good judicial opinion in so little time, kind of a caveat saying that it's a bad opinion but still it could have been better. So, somehow, this word means not up to standards, and probably now, because it's been used in so many different contexts, I've got it narrowed down, or broadened to um, sort of uh, modified it to mean standards of acceptability concerning...not up to the standards of acceptability of the domain in which it's occurring. So in the judicial domain, it's some kind of a word meaning not up to those standards, and the other one's is not up to those standards, if that makes sense. End of passage five, I asked the same stupid questions, and then I uh, I read that first part and I said, "well, that's why it's, that's not helping me. If I really want to know what this word means, this first part about nanny and Granddad with the cardboard Buckingham palace doesn't really help me with the word very much. It kinds of just sets the stage, " which kind of makes me think about the author's intentions again, and the author's intention is just to kind of musically or poetically describe a scene out of his childhood, and this word is incidental to it in one sense, and in another sense it is important because it is part of that very particular dance that the grandpa did. So that make me try and think of what that might be. And my word, because it's poetic and stuff, my rundownedness and my rundown and shabby doesn't really fit; to my mind it doesn't sound right, and not up to the standards, my longwinded definition, doesn't seem to fit there. So I went back and I said, "well, maybe there's a word that I can substitute for that." And I tried tawdry, which might be right - it would fit for all the other ones, right, I think, and it would, that alliteration thing, even though I am not supposed to think about it, I couldn't help but think about it. That would like, that would like seal the deal for me, because it's a T, so I think it's tawdry or something like that.

WR But that is not a noun.

BM Right.

KW: Tawdriness.

WR Tawdriness.

BM [overlapping] Tawdriness, yeah. Yeah, tawdriness, but I'm thinking, ummm, you know, I could stretch it to fit there, because it wasn't really a precisely used word in that passage, you know? It wasn't really, it was borderline poetry, if you know what it mean; it was so caught up in the word game thing.

KW: Right.

BM Um, and I thought of the author's intention so I went back to the first part of that, and I'm thinking, "Well, this is in England. Tawdry is kind of word that you would use in England; it's kind of an English/British thing." So I tried, I'm thinking tawdry, if I had to pick the word, but my definition is that it's not up to standards of the, of whatever thing you're in. It's like not real, erstatz, not real, not up to standards. And that's the end of my thinking.

WR Great. I think, before we go on, I have two comments: one serious and one maybe serious. The serious one is, it would be interesting in terms of confidence levels measures to see how many of us wind up agreeing, even if we are all wrong or not quite on the, on the dime, if we all more or less agree, that could be used as a kind of measure of confidence.

KW: Like agree that Brian's hypothesis is reasonable?

WR If you came up with a very similar hypothesis,

KW: Oh, I see.

WR Whether or not we're correct in some absolute sense, that would be a way I think of measuring some kind of confidence.

BM This is the one we did before we heard everybody.

WR Yeah.

KW: [unintelligible 5 words]

WR The other thing is, if we don't get funded by NSF, we can probably turn this into a fantastic board game

BM Here here!

WR And get millions of dollars.

BM Yeah, really! [laughs] Wendy There, there is a game.

WR Pictionary. Wendy No, um, is it Balderdash?

KW: Maybe. I can't think.

BM [overlapping] Yeah.

WR You try to think of a word and one person has the real definition and the rest of the group has to write a definition, and you have to pick the right definition.

MWK Yeah.

WR Right.

MWK This is Wendy Robey. Wendy Robey is a GA in the Reading Center this semester. She's the one that came up with this.

BM Well, my confidence is four on that [hypothesis], that I'm close.

Scott Okay. Um. Well, the first thing that I looked at in the first passage was the phrase, "first class, Romanian style, that is," um, which seems to indicate that, um, something that's first class, it's not really up to the standards of first class everywhere else in the world. So, that kind of, I guess, and then the...we're comparing schmalion with it's not comfortably upholstered, okay? "in the schmalion but comfortably upholstered apartments." So from those two different pass...or those two different phrases, I came up with could be something like dirty or rundown or threadbare or poor. Then the next, uh, the next occurrence of schmalion, um, it didn't really add much, to me, except that

WR By "next," do you mean the schmalion by solicitious?

Scott Yes, yes, I'm sorry. Not the next passage.

WR Yeah.

Scott Uh. It didn't really add to much except that schmalion can be applied to a person. Um, but I'm going to say here that its not a personality trait or some kind of mannerism, um, because we are contrasting it to solicitous, and also because we applied it to an inanimate object before. I think perhaps some of my background knowledge about Transylvania may have come into play here also, you know, um, with the Dracula movies you see a run down, country, darker, it's a dark place, it's poorer, it's agricultural, and also Eastern Europe [referring to Romanian train passage]. A lot of those same stereotypes kind of apply to that area. Um, in the next passage, I was mostly just confirming my previous hypothesis about poorer, poorer, run down. But, with this phrase, I could eliminate some of my previous possibilities, like dirty. I didn't' think I, I didn't Powys would call himself a dirty Taliessin or run-down Taliessin, but I kind of had to expand the definition a little bit to maybe like lesser or poorer. Um. I think perhaps a common phrase like "Someone is poor man's Shakespeare," or a poor man's whatever else kind of played into that. Um, thinking about it later, actually, when Brian was doing his passage, I thought, "well perhaps schmalion could mean modern day." If I was reading this passage, if passage two was the first passage, I'd be able to say to myself, "Well, maybe its poorer, maybe its lesser, but it could be a number of other things, also." In modern day was something that came to mind. Uh, passage three, I was more confused by than anything else [laughs]. I think the fact that it was a word game kind of really threw me off. Um, but [sighs], going...the occurrence of tequila there made me kind of think, "well, he's probably drunk. He's probably kind of doing something that's embarrassing himself or kind of contemptible or debased, so these were the two things I came up with for this passage, contemptible or debased. But not really too worried about relating it to the other passages, because the part of speech was different here. So, if it's not an exact match to my other, to my adjective definition, I'm not particularly worried about it, as long as the sense is kind of similar. Passage four didn't really help me very much at all [laughs]. The only thing I got from this was that um...well, I could...I stuck my previous hypothesis in there and it worked, you know? Something that the views that the seven justices were dismissed as poor or bad views, and it had a negative connotation for numerous flaws, and they were dismissed. And then in the final passage, um, again, it didn't seem to fit in with the other passages. It, you know, at first, something that a dance you would be doing for a child, you would want to do something maybe happier, a lighthearted dance or something like that, not something...you know, you wouldn't want to talk about a run- down train. But at the same time, you know, it's kind of....you can see where maybe, if you looked at it from a different point of view you could maybe make it work. If you looked at if from the point of view of, "Well, sometimes a clown will dress up as a tramp or something like that and kind of make light of that," perhaps we can kind of make it fit in that sense. Um, I also thought that if this were the first passage, I would get nothing from it. I would have no idea what schmalion was, because I could put in just about any word and it would work there - the happy train, the moving train, um, I wouldn't even know what part of speech it was here. Um, so

WR It's an adjective

Scott Well, no no no no. I know it's an adjective. But I'm saying if this was, if the fifth passage were the first passage, I could substitute a verb and it would still work. It could be the moving train.

WR That's still an adjective, a verbal.

Scott Oh, I'm sorry [laughs]. Okay. Well then I guess I've got to learn my linguistics a little bit better. But, um,

KW: It could really be either grammatically, there.

WR Anything that modifies a noun is by definition is an adjective. But there are different kinds of adjectives.

Scott I guess my major point here is that I wouldn't get much from this passage if it were the first passage. So.

WR Your overall confidence?

Scott Oh, I'd rate it a four. I probably wouldn't use it in speech, but if I read it again, I would have, I would feel pretty confident that I was getting the right sense of the passage.

WR Okay, what would that sense be?

Scott Something lesser or, er

WR [to

Scott and Brian[ So would you say that you two guys agree, more or less?

Scott I think so, yeah

BM [overlapping] More or less.

Scott We may be saying it in different ways, but

WR Okay

KW: And some of this may be a little redundant, I

WR That's good

KW: Well, the first thing I did was note immediately the part of speech. It was an adjective. Um, uh, and then activated my prior knowledge of Eastern Europe. Circled "first class Romanian style" "but comfortably" "serviceable, clean" "fin-de-siecle"- I don't know how to say this - "turn of the century" "unpretentious, hospital, and near bucolic." All those things together, together with my prior knowledge of Eastern Europe, made me suspect that people in the trains would be worn down and not very modern, so I hypothesized bedraggled, tattered, um, faded. I get, I get the sense from the first passage that the adjective schmalion is not a negative word, but reflects the overall "worn-down but still comfortable nature of Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet era." I turned, and I was trying to confirm my hypothesis. Um, again, it was an adjective form, um, but I...I spent a long time on this way, because I was really stuck into, on the second paragraph. Powys was clearly like a traditionalist, and old-fashioned sort. He doesn't use modern technology. Maybe schmalion refers to something retrograde? I was reaching. I was reaching. What is the word I am looking for? Not anachronistic, but stuff from the past. And that would work with the upholstery in the old train cars and the old uniforms of the train attendants. Um. But then reading about, the part about not liking technology, all I kept thinking about was that Unibomber guy [laughs] who hated technology Someone Right, right

KW: And I was trying to reach for adjectives that were used to describe him. And I was...Outdated, technophobic, apolitical, but then I couldn't remember - what's the political term? He's a-something. He doesn't like government. What is like called?

WR and

Scott or Brian Anarchist

KW: Anarchist? Which doesn't work at all. But for some reason I just kept thinking like, this, how this guy, had something to do with not liking things that were modern, so it kind of worked but it didn't really work with bedraggled or tattered, but it still sort of work with this idea of a hat or something being worn out or old, from a prior time. Passage three I immediately noticed schmalion was used as a noun here, um, and that it did not have a positive connotation. So I said schmalion might be a nonword for something beginning with T because of the alliteration.

WR Why did it not have a positive connotation?

KW: Um, well, again, "tequila stultifies Timothy Tuttle, transubstantiating Timothy into tottering schmalion," well, he's obviously, you know, a drunken idiot at this point in time, you know? So that is not a very good word. Um, but, uh....again. I like hypothesized tattered. I said, "tattered works with train compartments and a uniform with train attendants and maybe even with the second passage. But tattered is too easy; Wendy would never have picked that!" And then I started thinking of things beginning with T, and I kept thinking of the Latin root "temp" which means time, and I was trying to brainstorm a word having "temp" in it that meant from a former time, but I couldn't think of one, so I just moved on. Number four, um...this is a topic about which we all have a lot of prior knowledge, so as soon as I got to the opinions and Bush versus Gore, all of that got activated. Um. And then the topic sentence, "numerous flaws in the opinions in Bush vs. Gore" lets me know, without even reading the rest of the paragraph, what side this author was on. Um. And the, the, um, okay, So again it's a noun construction, this time with a negative connotation. Um, if the critics says the opinion was flawed then the views, and the views of the justices were schmalion, that's how I know it was negative. Um, using my prior knowledge of the issue, I'd say the author who called the justices views schmalion said so because he or she believed the Florida voting system was badly flawed and that using a paper ballot with people of limited literacy was foolish, um, and so if the justices thought a paper ballot was okay, then they were stupid and unrealistic and living in the dark ages or in a time warp. Then I kind of was thinking about that. And so that sort of works with my prior hypothesis of the word sense having to do with something from a past time. So I kept it. And then, the last passage actually helped a lot, because once you explained "heavy brogues" as boots, and then that dancing on a thick plank, that reminded me of that film The Song Catcher. Did you see that? About the - whatcha call it? - about the musicologist who goes back to find songs in the Appalacian mountains? Well, there's this scene where Appalacian folks are dancing on boards in just sort of like their heavy farming boots? It's not really tap exactly, but it's not quite Irish line dancing. It's just some traditional countrified form of dancing, so, uh....when grandpa danced, I can assume that the author found it fun and memorable, because it was like quaint or antiquated from some previous time period, some kind of a throwback. So my final definition was schmalion, adjective, refers to something or someone that is evoking a previous time period, antiquated, anachronistic, outdated, um, and then as a noun, I just turned that something or someone evoking a previous time period...antiquity doesn't really work there, but I still think it has to do with that idea of the past.

WR Confidence.

KW: Four?

MWK And comprehension?

KW: Well

MWK Overall?

KW: It's difficult to speak to the issue of overall comprehension because my cognitive energy was diverted to inferring the meaning of the target word, however in searching for the clues and formulating and testing hypotheses, I reread each text enough times that if I were asked questions about it, I could probably answer them. But if I had to retell them, I wouldn't have a great sense of completeness.

WR How close do you think your definition is to Brian's and

Scott's?

KW: Well, actually, once, before Brian, like while he was talking, I was brainstorming T words, and I did come up with tawdry, and that seemed to go back and work. But that I didn't come up with until after I'd written all that stuff. It was before he said it, but I didn't come up with it until he started talking.

WR So

KW: About this first passage.

WR So, but the, my understanding of you guys, your definition, is something like not quite up to par, a little bit run down, and so on [

KW: talks over his next few words] not quite the same.

KW: [overlap] And mine is something like old, or from an older time.

MWK I would say low.

KW: Hmm?

MWK I would classify, if I had to classify these two definitions, yours and theirs compatibility as high, average, or low, I would say low.

WR Yeah.

BM Yeah.

MWK What would you say?

KW: [pause] I guess I would say average, because I don't think we are really circling around different concepts.

Santosh In the third paragraph, she was agreeing with them; she was like [2 unclear words] the thing is tawdry, poor, threadbare,

KW: Worn out.

Santosh But in the fifth, she revises her beliefs and comes to a positive connotation like it is old but it warrants respect.

MWK All right. [someone must have noted him writing] I'm just the scorekeeper,

BM [laughs]

WR [unclear word]

Santosh?

Santosh Okay. Umm.

MWK Karen? Turn that around. [referring to tape recorder. She adjusts it so the internal microphone faces

Santosh]

WR Without unplugging it.

Santosh When I started reading the first paragraph, the first letter I circled, the first word I circled was "Romanian style." It kind of uh invoked that aura of being royal or Roman kind of people. The Romans, the kings, so kind of royalty attached to it, and then it's from Romania the Eastern bloc where the generals and the higher ups in the military live liberally. Their lifestyle has that, you'll see those good fireplaces, cigars, and that kind of image. And so I circled back, and the next clue was "with schmalion but comfortably upholstered apartments." That means the apartments are luxurious, but they're not plush or gaudy or like to the date or modern, up to date equipment. So I wrote here like "not overtly gaudy but sufficient to be luxurious." So I checked the word. That's when I stopped for the first part of schmalion, and then I went on to read "equally schmalion but solid citz [unclear] attendants." There I said its adjective word to the person there, but its with a positive connotation, so I wrote down, "The person may be polite with humility;" the attendant is polite, he has humility, but they also appreciate him doing his job. So I though of it in a positive connotation. So there I regressed from like, diverged from these guys. And there I thought of it as a great thing, but its luxurious, so my definitions, the first one has been used in a sense of great but luxurious or comfortable, and the second time it appears in the same first paragraph, it is used as polite with humility, poorly dressed but an appreciated attendant. Then I moved on to the second paragraph, where Powys describes himself as "a schmalion Taliessin," however you say it, and when you read on for the Powys is a primitive at heart, he likes old things, so then I tried to figure him as modern day misfit. He is in modern day, but he doesn't fit himself as a modern person. He doesn't see himself as a modern person. So I thought of, I don't know where the word Don Quixote came into my mind, but I thought maybe he is like a foolish kind of person. But then Powys' thoughts were outdated but he considered himself good despite that. He's kind of seeing himself a person who should be respected, despite his views of, against, technology use. So I, then again, it went back to the same thing, that he's a modern day misfit. He sees himself with respect but he doesn't see himself fitting into the technological word.

WR But how did you get that from the phrase "schamlion Taliessin" together with the surrounding passage.

Santosh Yeah. He says its magician combined Taliessin, so Taliessin was a respected person in the olden times. He was a magician, he was a b-, and he was a role model, so he was a person who was always respected, but he was from the bygone days, and in the modern days he hates all these things, but still he didn't like talking on the phone because he didn't want his words violated by a tangle of wire. Who worries about words unless he's important, unless he sees himself important to the world?

WR So how, how...All right. So what definition did you come up for schmalion here?

Santosh This time I thought of it as an old but a royal guy; old but great. But he's not treating himself in the modern day.

WR Okay. And, and did you try to relate this to the first definition?

Santosh Yeah. Uh, in the first definition I had it as quaint but luxurious. Here I thought it of, I thought of the same word as old, but some greatness, but also as light negative hint with a modern day misfit thing coming in, so I was trying to revise the definition with a touch of...It's like you're trying to say something good but at the same time you're saying that some part of it may not be good. The same, same adjective may mean negatively sometimes. Then the third paragraph, I was more confident here. The third paragraph It says "tequila stultifies Timothy Tuttle, transubstantiating Timothy into a tottering schmalion." I didn't see this as a negative thing at all. I just saw it as a descriptive of the state Timothy was in. He was tottering, he was like some antique of bygone days, a shaky waving which is like about to fall down. So Timothy was stoned but he was still standing; he was tottering. He may fall down, but he may not also. So I thought of it as that description. And then, uh, "Connstable stops Tuttle," all that, so I saw Timothy as being drunk and about to fall down, so that reminded me of old buildings, so thought of this thing as an entity from bygone days. So that matched my other definition, saying this thing is good, it invokes respect, but it has a slight negative touch to it, like it's gone, it's a thing of the past. That kind of image. So I write down, "tottering old guy, aged old guy." Then I came to my final definition, which is that it's an entity of bygone days which invokes some respect. When you look at it, you feel awe, like that. In the fourth paragraph, again here, it says "how hard it is to write a good judicial opinion in so little time. It dismisses as schmalion the views of seven justices." So this I thought of as ancient, outdated views which may not be respected. But, by this time, I was already biased to my definition. I was already thinking that this is something...ancient kind of thing. So here outright the author is against the justices, so he is trying to put their view as a thing of the past, like their, their view is wrong. They're thinking in the wrong way. That kind of thing. The author is assuming that he is a modern day person who is looking at all aspects of the judges think. So here a big negative connotation creeps it, but its not that negative to call it foolish views of the judges, an outdated view, but not exactly a fool, foolish view. So then the next, so the revision was outdated, ancient views of the judge. That words I put in for shamalion. In the last paragraph, again, it says uh, "Buckingham Palace," the royal things, they're old but they have respect to them, the palace thing. A train - for any kid a train with a locomotive engine is like, even though it is a thing of the past it invokes respect immediately, you're attracted to that car immediately. A train is a train. So, you have kind of respect to it. It's a idol of bygone days. Right now you may be flying here and there, but a train, even now respect, you have to respect a train, because the journey's quite different from normal. So when that, uh, grandpa is doing that thing for the girl, or, uh, for the person in the paragraph, I thought of it as an ancient thing which invokes respect like a here of bygone days. Again, one more defintion was idol of bygone days, I-d-o-l kind of thing. Then leftover thing from history but still liked by all. That kind of...definition I ended up for that word. Like it's a thing of past but it invokes respect. Sometimes you may not respect it because you don't, many times you don't like the views of the older guy with you, so there may be a negative connotation there, but still it's okay.

WR What's your confidence on that?

Santosh I give it three.

WR And again, how would you compare your definition to the others that you heard?

Santosh With them [meaning Brian and

Scott], it is totally different - they are totally looking at it negatively and I am totally giving it a positive connotation.

WR Right.

Santosh With her [meaning

KW:], in her third paragraph definition, I don't agree, but in the fourth and fifth she comes very close to my definition. She says it's antiquated, but it is respected, so in the end paragraph when she revises her belief, she comes very close to my definition.

WR Do, do you agree? [to

KW:]

KW: Well, uh, I guess, I guess do, but I didn't see it as having a, a connotation that was specific to the word. I saw the connotation as being context-specific, so sometimes it was used in a positive way, and sometimes - or not negative way, I should say, which is different than positive. Sometimes it had sort of a neutral connotation, and sometimes it had a negative connotation.....um.

WR Okay. Yulai? Yulai First paragraph in [unclear] First is, when I read the sentence with Romania, and I didn't know it, so I went to the "comfortably upholstered." So comfortable I think is the opposite of schmalion, and uh also I got, I went down, kept going to [unclear] visitors, and uh, so schmalion is like not comfortable, um, and what I thought, it's not some visitors, so this is something like warm hearted. It's not warm hearted. So I was confused at this point. But I think it's, it's a negative word. So I wrote down "uncomfortable" and it's not warm hearted, so it's like that. And then later on I noticed that the Romanian, Romanian, but I understood some European building style, not like shabby or poor.

WR and

KW: Hmm. Yulai So like that. That's the first. So I wrote out maybe simple, uncomfortable, and not warm- hearted. So like that. And the second passage, the second passage I mainly go the idea from the second paragraph. It's like he didn't use anything, more anything, like television or phone, so it's, let me recall like Amish people, something like that. So I think maybe, prima, prima, primitive, and uh since he mentioned he's a primitivist, so I think schmalion here is mainly refer to primitive, not sophisiticated, and uh not modern. So that uh second paragraph like that. And uh, so when I, when I, when I combined the first, the first and second one, I think that simple is the common point that they share, and uh, of course you can say not comfortable, since primitive means that its not, if people felt life, it's not comfortable, they won't let them more than life, something. And third paragraph I was totally lost, it's pretty vague, and uh.

MWK Pretty what? I didn't get that. Yulai Vague.

WR Vague. Yulai Yeah.

MWK Okay. Yulai Yeah. Uh. Since he used like stullifies, tottering, stuttering, something like not continuously and discrete, and I first think maybe something? But when I. But yeah. When I want to, constable stops. I think something like stable, something? I, maybe I though wrongly. So I...actually, I couldn't get any idea. Okay. The first paragraph. First I noticed the "numerous flaws," and then from numerous flaws I notice "dismisses." This is the key word, so I think that means the ideas of the several, seven justices, the flaws, prove that the ideas of the seven justices was very foolish, was not correct. And, uh, so, the schmalion is like a negative word, and maybe it's not correct, incorrect, not good, and bed. And also his next context "It punctures," so I, I think this word, um, since the context, we, I had in context had an idea like, no, that wrong idea is Bush won the vote and Gore failed. So it's the "punctures" that means that satire or something, so that...and also the seven justice and their idea maybe thought the Florida vote was not legal, so, but actually people accept that, so it's a, and uh, so that's a fact, uh, uh, the fact proved that the justice idea or thoughts was not correct, so from this paragraph I got the conclusion that its not good and I think its bad. So from the first, second, and till third, I think its, uh, simple, primitive, incorrect. But incorrect is not equal to simple

WR Right Yulai So I expand the meaning of the word. The, the fifth paragraph, I, I think this also proves that schmalion means equal to simple and primitive, since it didn't use the real train, it's just a mimic, so then I used the word mimic, and also in the first paragraph, "the pose of a sailor," so it's not the real thing, it's just they use the simplest way to mimic the real world. So its also some other word like uh, ummm...like when, with habit broke, a blur, so everything prove that, so I think it's simple, cheap, or something. So my conclusion is simple, cheap, bad, or primitive. So that's the meaning. Primitive and simple could be combined together, not, another meaning meaning simple, not good.

WR So what's your confidence? Yulai* For simple and primitive, my confidence is like four. And for uh incorrect, three or something.

WR Okay. And how, how would you compare your definition to those you heard before? Yulai* And for

Scott and uh, uh [gestures to Brian], their idea I think I can share with primitive and simple, but not like poor, I didn't think like that. Their, I think, this word should be neutral. It's not like, a little bit neutral, but a little bit biased to negative, but not negative totally, so I think like that.

MWK

Santosh [he means Yulai*], how do you compare to those two? Yulai* I agree with them it's uh like, it's neutral, uh, it's not negative, right? You guys think positive? But I don't think it's a positive word, so.

WR So this is really interesting, because the four, the five of you have all given the same confidence level, but I hear at least three if not four different definitions. And this is consistent with my theory that people don't, almost never mean the same thing by the word.

KW: [laughs]

WR So your understanding of this word schmalion really differs. Maybe two of you are pretty [the tape runs out and the dialogue picks up on the next side[ besides the one, we all have different meanings for it to, to some extent, yet we are all equally confident. This word "Romanian," [sighs]

Santosh, I think, misunderstood it. And Yulai admitted that he misunderstood it. Yulai thought it had something to do with the building style, Romanesque, which is a style of architecture.

Santosh, I think, thought it meant Roman style, as opposed to an adjective for the country Romania, right?

Santosh Yeah.

WR And, and that led you down that different path. And yet you still got some of the same overtones that the three previous people had. All right. So, so here's mine. So I read "first class Romanian style," and said, "Okay, given what I know about Romania, that means probably not fully first class." Then it occurred to me, if that word had been something else, it might have meant better than first class. Right? First class-Monoco style, that's you know, grand class, right? So if I didn't know the background about Romania and just the grammatical structure, it doesn't tell me in what way it's not first class. Uh, so then I read "schmalion but comfortably upholstered," and it's the word but that suggested to me that whatever schmalion means, it's characterizing something that you wouldn't normally expect to be comfortably upholstered. Not that it's the opposite of comfortably upholstered, but it's something else that the compartment is that makes it such that you wouldn't normally expect it to be comfortably upholstered. And the same thing for the "schmalion but solicitous attendants." They are attendants that are both schmalion and solicitious, but because they are schmalion, you wouldn't normally expect them to be...solicitious. Okay? Um?

MWK This isn't fair. I have to go after a logician.

WR That's right [general laughter]. So they are sort of comfortably upholstered despite being schmalion, solicitious despite being schmalion. Um. And that's consistent with not being fully-first class, right? From the Romanian style. So, um, let's see, what else did I think about this? So I decided maybe run-down, or dirty, or old, which are ideas that a lot of you had. Um, my confidence here, for this particular one, was pretty high. I don't know what the word is, but my confidence in understanding it was pretty high. I wrote 4.5. Um, and I think it is, I interpret it um, Michael, you request for comprehension to mean for each passage, how important is the word for comprehending each passage? I think it's important for comprehending this passage. Okay. Next passage. He called himself a schmalion Taliessin. Um, so my, my first thought was that since Taliessin is an old historical figure and Powys is more or less contemporary, that the phrase modern day came to mind - that he's a modern-day Taliessin. But that didn't seem consistent with being old or run down. So another possibility I, I had was maybe, with another phrase, there are these catch phrases, right? A modern day so and so, or I thought maybe a poor man's Taliessin, or a poor Taliessin. That seemed a little more consistent um, 'cause poor man is a phrase you use because you are comparing one thing to another that's better, and there was that overtone with the earlier use of schmalion. And so my confidence here was also about four, but here I didn't think it was all that important for my overall comprehension of the passage. It would be important of my comprehension of the sentence, but not necessarily for comprehending the rest of it. Um. [turns page[ third passage. This is the one that threw all of us off, right? This was the one that really was weird, and I think part of it was because this is a part of speech. But my thinking was, well, if Tuttle drank too much, he'd be drunk, so maybe schmalion just means drunk, right? "Transubstantiated Timothy into a tottering drunk." But that's not consistent with the notions of old or worn down. But then I thought, "Well, maybe I can get the three to merge together with the phrase not up to par," which again I think some of you had something similar to. Here my confidence is much weaker, and I don't think that it's...I don't know how important the word schmalion was to understanding this, which I hardly understood at all anyway. It was just really weird. Um, the next passage, it dismisses as schmalion the views of seven justices, so the view that the Florida court had violated equal protection, um, was what was being called shmalion, and that in turn allowed the author of Breaking the Deadlock to dismiss it. Right? So the author of the book. Breaking the Deadlock, disagrees with the Florida court's views, so whatever schmalion means, it's got to mean something negative, and that is consistent with the previous hypotheses, that negative overtone. Again, I was trying to find one single word that covered everything, and the closes I came up with here was the word "simple." That may be the noun simpleton for the tottering simpleton.

KW: Hmm.

WR My confidence here was only about three, but I didn't think that understanding the actual word itself was all that important. It was dismissive; it didn't matter sort of why he was dismissive. [turns page] Well, then finally the schmalion train. Well, here I have, I had no idea, and I didn't think it was central to understanding the passage. I mean, this was just an adjective, it was the title of a song or a dance, and it didn't seem crucial. But then I said, okay, what could I figure out? Well, it's something that a train could be, a physical object, so we know that compartments can be schmalion, people can be schmalion, trains can be schmalion; those are al; physical objects, but also views can be schmalion, and that's something abstract, so maybe that one there is being used metaphorically. So I was thinking, what could a train be? And since the dance was mimicking a locomotive, I thought maybe its something like an imitation train, or a toy train, only its not quite real, and that's not consistent with the previous hypotheses, so I really wasn't sure what to do. Um, when I left the room, I started thinking about, is there something that brings all of this together, and the only thing I could think of was second class, Right? Which I think agrees with you guys. Um. My overall confidence rating is about three point five. So That's where I am.

MWK And your overall comprehension, do you think?

WR Well, I, I , I, overall comprehension, its okay, as I say I was more concerned with how important the word was for comprehending the passage. That's what I ...thought you meant by comprehension.

MWK Well, I'll try to go quickly because I know some of these are the same. I had two thoughts. The first thing I saw was Romania. I thought, oh boy, it isn't going to work and it's going to be late! [someone laughs] Um, um, but that comes from having had a couple of Romanian students who

WR Didn't work [loud static]

MWK And it was always in late. Okay, um, and so, um, I, I wrote down that schmalion was describing a train compartment and then describing attendants, but it was contrasting in that description by using the word "but." Uh, and so, and I won't go over, "but." It is schmalion but it's comfortable, it is schmalion but it's uh, uh solicious [meaning solicitous]. Uh. I think that, uh, my thoughts were here that a word means something like serviceable, ordinary, plain, non-luxury, adequate, but it can't be serviceable because the writer - and this is the Atlantic Monthly - uses the word serviceable down the line a little bit, and he wouldn't do that. He's repeated [it] in here for effect, okay? But he wouldn't repeat it down here, because here he is talking about something different. Um, I also said it could be small, because that's what compartments could be, or diminutive, but that would mean the servants

WR Yeah.

MWK Would have to be small, and uh, my thought is that Romanians don't ever strike me as necessarily by, uh, race to be small. Okay. So that didn't work. So I am really kind of back to the word serviceable and anything that goes with it. [turns page of protocol]. Um, it took me a long time to figure out what the hell t-a-l-i-e-s-s-i-n was. And I said, "Oh! That's Taliessen!" and I never knew who he was, but I knew the name, okay? And the second paragraph was totally useless, and I said to myself, "Why did Wendy put that in there? We don't need that paragraph!" Okay, but anyway. One of the things that struck me here was that he called himself "a" - "a Taliessin," So this word doesn't begin with a vowel. Uh, it can't be ordinary, it can't be "a ordinary..." It can't be anything that begins with U, and I had a word for that. And since he's modeled himself after Taliessin, he views himself as somewhat similar, but he is a little different. He's a new version; he's a modern version. Um, and I wish I knew more about Taliessen. [turns page] Passage three, I was totally, uh, transubstantiated by the word transubstantiated, and was totally taken aback by the fact that people knew what the hell that word was, and I had never even seen it before, and there were people in this room who knew that. Uh, um, and so all I got here is [that it's] now a noun. And I just said, "Oh the hell with it; I'm going on to the next passage." [turns page] It's too bad! Okay, um, this one I felt, um, I felt like I understood this passage. They're dismissing these seven judges' views, even the liberals. It must mean that the logic or the reasoning or the line of thinking, um, because he classifies the views - not the decision - but he classifies the views.

WR Hmm.

MWK And it's also quoted, so it's got to be a good meaty word, if he's taking it from somebody else's text, okay? So it's, I would say that I am really starting to think about fancier words now like fallacious or vacuous, facetious, but all or them meaning not honest, not real, not good, not up to snuff, and uh I was feeling very confident about reading this paragraph and knowing that this paragraph, that these views weren't just well reasoned. But I didn't have any idea what the word meant, okay? [moving on to next passage] So this is a dance, it sounds like a locomotive, sure sounds like limitation. Imitation, excuse me. So I did the same thing Bill did. I took the five sets of clues and put them together, and doing the contrasting, and I came up with a final definition of nearly adequate, barely acceptable, serviceable, second-class, and I rated my confidence 1 [there is laughter] is what the word meant, okay? And I rated my comprehension 4+. However, when Brian went to his second page -- and that is written here in ink, I want you to know, when I cheated - "I think it's tawdry," okay? Because of the T. Because of the T. So, oh! [to

WR] We didn't rate your compatibility with, I would say you are more compatible with Brian and

Scott

WR And you

MWK and me than you are with those three,

WR That's right.

MWK because they had much more the antiquity part of it,

WR Yeah.

MWK the age part. Okay. Um, So, now, let me write, let me tell you what I've written down, because I think this is important, this little thing here. High, high, high, high, no average with Karen, average with

Santosh, and average or low with Yulai, you're out, and with me, something's wrong with my table, okay, here we go. Okay. Now, uh, I'm high with you, I'm really much the same. I'd like to make a couple of comments before we go on, also. Um,

WR Just note by the way it's 3:00, so

MWK Yeah. Um, then we'll end with...I had many thoughts that I did not write down, and I overlooked them. So if we put this into a methodology, uh, we need to prime the pump I think. I don't know how. All of us, me too, I think --- no, that's the wrong thing. I know what I want. All of us, uh, really aimed for consistency. Uh, even I think sometimes in the face of contravening evidence.

WR Yeah, I thought that was really [

KW: overlaps but not clearly] I felt that I was being tossed on the sea with high waves, because every time I saw the word, it seemed to me to be entirely different.

MWK Right.

WR And I had to really force myself to be consistent with the previous

MWK Also, a strategy, and we talked about his at lunch, okay? A strategy that I thought seemed cool out of this was when you feel you comprehend the passage, and that's the way I felt with the very first passage, even though I didn't know exactly what those compartments were, but I knew they were something not quite great,

WR Right

MWK Okay? So I said "So, I have a really good sense of what this word means," and I had a much better sense then than I did when I got done,

WR Yeah.

MWK Uh, that's probably not a bad strategy - that if you think you've comprehended the passage or the text that you're reading, the paragraph or the immediately surrounding paragraphs, and you have created a sense of this word, stick with that. Stick with that until somebody whoops you up along the head and say that

WR Elshout-Mohr, van Daal, and Kaptein say that good readers do that; they're analytic. They start, they get sort of a framework,

KW: Right

WR and try to refine that framework. Whereas poor readers are holistic; they get a new definition every time they see the word.

KW: Well, good readers fill in the gaps.

WR Right.

KW: They find a way to make their hypothesis make sense by, by connecting it somehow, yeah.

WR [to Wendy] And the answer is? Wendy Tatterdemalion.

WR Wow!

KW: Could you write it on the board? Wendy Pass that around. You need to take one. [apparently to Brian] I picked it out for you. Brian I should have known. Wendys Yeah. I'd never heard of that word before.

WR I never knew what that word meant, but now I do.

KW: [overlapping] I've never seen this, ever! Wendy You were going to get "sesquepedalion." [overlapping laughter] Does everyone know what that is?

KW: So, when we got bedraggled, tattered, or even tawdry, uh, except tawdry can sometimes be used with kind of an off-color kind of reference, but it's also sometimes used for something that's old and [unclear]

MWK I'll be darned

KW: Not, not nice; used to be good quality, no longer is [unclear].

MWK But the tawdry train and grandpa dancing for his children, that tawdry just wouldn't - you're right - no one would use tawdry with grandfather and grandchildren in the same paragraph. But as soon as said tawdry, I put it with, in paragraph three, I put it with

WR Very good.

MWK Very good!

WR I told you this would make a great TV show [laughter]. Celebrity guests, and

KW: Thank you Wendy! Wendy It was so great to hear you guys try to figure it out.

MWK Now I have a much better sense of what it means. We all do this, but we all cheat. We either skip it or we go right to the dictionary.

WR But then, consider, if you'd have given us tatterdemalion, none of us would have known it, We would not, never be able to have this "aha" experience, because there IS, I mean, that's the word, you just have to get a rough definition. We only get the "aha" experience because it was substituted with something else. Brian The definition, where ever it is, " person wearing ragged or tattered clothing; a ragamuffin," that's

WR That's Brian The adjective is kind of uh, comes off of that and is sort of an inference, sort of.

WR That's right. Brian It's kind of uh, even though it's not your ragged and tattered, I think it comes off as kind of symbolic or artistic

WR A metaphorical use. Brian Metaphoric, that is probably what I am trying to say.

WR I so I think that if we, the four of us, pretty much got it, and I think they were almost there.

MWK But it's interesting too, but where we all went off, I think, the ancient, the aged, the Taliessin passage was misleading, because it doesn't matter what comes first, it doesn't matter what you attribute, which one you take as giving you the most stock in

WR Well, another interesting set of experiments like this would be to give seven or eight people passages, but in different order.

KW: Oh, yeah! Could we do that with 557 next week when we do meaning vocabulary?

MWK Very good. Brian Or not give them all the passages at all, because they'd be, I mean, we're only able to know with five, by comparison with other passages. Does this really happen with a real reader?

WR Well, that's a major issue in the research, that most readers will only see one occurrence of the word, maybe two at most. Uh, I'm, I'm not as concerned about that as I am trying to get the process down pat, and the more words the better. Brian So it would be the same, you think.

MWK I've never seen this word.

KW: Do you need to get consent forms from our students to do that?

MWK Give them...IRB?

KW: Consent forms so that they sign off saying that it's okay?

MWK This is debatable. It's debatable.

KW: Should I do one anyway, just in case?

MWK Yeah, yeah.

KW: I mean we have them. Just copy them.

MWK That office always give you funny answers when you talk about doing it with graduate students. Okay. Um. I've never seen this word, so what I'm chiming in on this is [that] I know when I've seen a word before and I don't know it. I say, "Oh, I've seen that word. " Somebody brought up a word the other day and I said, "I've looked that word up probably three times and I can't begin to tell you what it means." Uh, I've never sent this word, so I'm with you. We do encounter, if you're a pretty good reader, you do encounter these words over and over again. I've never encountered this one.

WR But now you are going to see it everywhere.

KW: I don't know about that.

MWK But we have a class of master's students next week, so,

KW: We are doing meaning vocabulary, right?

MWK Yeah, we're doing meaning vocabulary, so Brian The fact that a writer would use it twice in one sentence, though, like the guy in the Atlantic reviewing travel, it makes me not want to read that magazine [general laughter].

WR At least not that writer.

MWK Well, every where I ask my wife, I mean she took it for twenty years, and now she doesn't want it any more. We get Harpers.

KW: Oh, I love Atlantic!

WR Yeah, it's become really tatterdemalion [laughter]. Brian Yeah, it's a bit schmalion.

MWK Thank you, good, Brian I'm going to use that when I get home.

KW: It's probably just because it piles up, it's just like too much to read.

MWK [to Wendy] Don't say anything to 556. Wendy Can I have a copy of the definition? And then I'll make copies.

[the dialogue about planning the copying of the protocols continues and eventually the tape gets turned off.]

"Schmalion" Think-Aloud, CVA Team, Winter 2002-2003 Page 1