antiquated
omissions
nuclear annihilation
bourgeois
Shiite
turpitude
Caspar Weinberger
Phyllis Schlafly
legibility
lobotomized
libido
mace
euphemism
extremities
vigilante
Saul Bellow
lymph nodes
repugnant
Betty Ford
Betty Friedan
commode
gullible
Machiavellian
foreshadowing
wake (in the funereal sense)
Jeanne Kirkpatrick
pipe dream
lascivious
têtes de poisson
obsolescence
apartheid
hollandaise
— List of words and historical/cultural figures I learned from reading comics when I was a kid. Specifically, these were words from the anthology Bloom County Babylon that I read until the pages were all soft round the edges. To this day, when I encounter certain of these words (antiquated, lascivious, and extremities, particularly), the exact phrases from the strips resonate in my head.
This book is noteworthy not just because I puzzled over it for years as a child, trying to figure out why punchlines about Jeanne Kirkpatrick were funny, but also because when I tried to submit this book as contributing to my requisite page-count for reading one week in second grade, Mrs. Wilson told me she would not count comics.
If there’s any evidence that allowing students to read what they want in any genre, rather than pressing a canon on them, can expand their vocabulary and engage them in important human themes, this may be it.
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