Over the past week I held my first real class, teaching a roomful of students writing about science on Appledore Island (along with a few ornithological auditors, shown in this picture of my classroom). They put up with a relentless schedule of researching and writing and ended up with some excellent pieces about everything from robot sharks to the right way to hold a warbler in your hand. I’ll be posting the fruits of their labors in a couple days at Science on Shoals.

Along the way, we talked a lot about words. Time and again, as I reviewed the assignments from the students, I came across words would fit comfortably in a textbook or a scientific paper, but,