This week: Mulct. What a horrible word. Not the meaning, just to say. It sort of sits on the tongue like a wart. Ugh. Anyway, let’s talk about.
Fined by Me
YA, or Young Adult Fiction, didn’t really exist when I was a kid. I mean it did, just not the way it is now, with entire wings of bookstores devoted to the various subgenres like angsty vampire teens and angsty counter-culture teens and angsty normcore teens…
The way I remember it, the library had a basement that served as the kids’ reading room. And don’t let the term basement fool you. It was a massive room with wide, safe steps leading down into a brightly lit space with kindly librarians and rack upon rack of hardcovers, softcovers, and everything in between. I loved it. But I also found it kind of limiting. Once you got through the Hardy Boys and the Black Stallion1 and Oz and Narnia and Wonderland, pickings started to get a little slim.
I started to gravitate to a room just up the stairs, to the science-fiction and fantasy room. Just as brightly lit but less inviting, the shelves of that grown-up oriented room towered over my head and the spaces between them were narrower and harder to navigate through. But this is where they kept Bradbury and Heinlein, both of whose oeuvre contained not a few juvenile oriented books. And so I read through the ones I could handle2 and made a mental note to come back to the ones I could not3.
Bridging the gap between these two rooms was a small shelf set inside the main fiction room where they kept books for “advanced readers” - novels by M.E. Kerr and Judy Blume and the like. I read them. I enjoyed some of them but a lot of these novels were too much like being lectured. The moral of the story could often been seen like one of those magic-eye pictures, like if you squinted hard enough you could see the LESSON behind the text.
So, it’s with some jealousy that I’ve watched Young Adult blossom from an overlooked and underserved subgenre into its own thing. And since I often work with ESL or young readers, I get to read a lot of the major releases under the guise of “work4.” And one thing I’ve noticed is that there are a lot fewer lessons hidden in the books these days5.
To be clear, I don’t think those early YA authors set out with the goal of educating. I think it’s more that the YA novel is the modern Bildungsroman, a story of someone’s coming-of-age, the transition between the wondrous adventures of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood. Fortunately, as the genre has evolved it has become less “adult telling kids what they need to know” and more, “characters learning things about the world and oh god I hope the kid reading this figures it out too.”
Educated Duress
But, also? It’s the Information Age. Maybe I’m reaching here, but I think about the books I read as a kid and knowledge was always precious and heavily guarded. Don’t go read the magician’s books, it’s full of dark magic. Don’t sneak around the laboratory and read the scientist’s notes, they’re full of things you’re not ready to understand.
Contrast that with a lot of the books being written now - don’t know something? Look it up. There’s a whole variety of ways to do so. Even a lot of the younger fantasy stories now have some version of the internet to let young practitioners find new knowledge6. And this is important because, if there is a LESSON in a lot of these newer stories, it’s that knowledge is power and the only thing stopping you from accessing it is you.
And that’s where a lot of modern authors are having a bit of sneaky fun. Have a favorite fact or word? Engineer a scene where your young protagonist has to look it up. Bonus points if you don’t actually tell the reader what they found. And, man, I’m here for it. But, as a teacher, it can kind of throw you off your game.
Which brings me to this week’s new word and an example of some serious hubris on my part.
All Mulched Up
I've been reading The Strange Case of Origami Yoda. This is kind of a strange book, but it is perfect for little boys7. It's gross and funny but also kind of sensitive and revealing. It also has a ton of words my students don't know. Which I expect. It also has a few words I don't know, which, call me arrogant, I did not expect. I mean, the book is written for fifth graders. I can pass all the fifth grade vocabulary tests, I promise.
One pivotal scene late in the first act takes place at a spelling bee. Now, I have not, personally, ever entered a spelling bee. I love words, I love language. Spelling? Not so much. In fact, I don't think I've even ever seen a spelling bee except in movies or t.v. shows. But. In this scene, the child protagonists are given the words brown, frankly, without, and politics. So far, so good, right?
The book ups the stakes. In the second round, the kids get vestige and muscular. Again, so far, so good. But, in a surprising (and non-spoilery) twist, those are not the words that the main protagonist had studied. No, they studied the word mulct. And I tell you, Reader, I didn't think it was a real word. See, in the story, the kid is told to study the word by...well, just read it. It'll take you an hour and is worth it, promise.
Anyway, the kid is given the word by an unreliable source and so I thought that that source was just messing with the main kid. Whoops. Turns out, it's a real word.
: to punish by a fine
2a: to defraud especially of money : SWINDLE
b: to obtain by fraud, duress, or theft
Yeah, I don’t like it. It doesn’t feel right. I mean, first, what the hell kind of verb ends in a ~ct?8 And is that one syllable9 or two? Is the simple past tense form mulcted? Ugh. I just checked. It is. Like, who thought this was a good idea? Tom muclted Jim out of $20 last Friday. It’s just gross. I feel slightly justified in that my computer’s spellchecker does not register it as a word.
Also, is mulct a contronym?10 I guess it depends on whether "to fine" and "to defraud" are considered antonyms?11 Let's check. Turns out that neither fine nor fraud in either noun or verb forms are listed as antonyms of each other. Mulct is listed as a synonym of fine, though, so that's something.
So, which came first, the fine or the fraud? The former definition is earliest by about two centuries; the fraud meaning didn't show up until the 1700s.
Anyway. Back to teaching. The student I have been reading the book with skipped over the word. I mean, who wouldn't? Knowing what mulct meant wasn't really important to the story. But this is where I, as a teacher, got stuck. Because, on the one hand, I didn't want to break his flow. He was reading and enjoying the story and that's exactly what I want him to get out of the lesson. On the other hand, I glossed over god knows how many words as a young reader.
And with dictionaries being so readily available online, I thought it would be better to make it a teaching moment and, once he had finished the chapter, to go back and ask what he thought it meant. There is, by the way, zero context in the story. It's simply a word that the character didn't know how to spell. So I showed the student how to use a couple of dictionaries and then I told him that I hadn't known the word either.
Broke his little mind. You mean teacher doesn't know everything? What a mulct.
91 Days:
The 91 Days project is going strong. You can read up on the project, see how it’s going, or join in by following the links below. It’s a lot of fun so far and I’d love to see how other people do with the challenge.
Down the Rabbit Hole:
Since I’m writing about YA fiction this week, I’m going to share some of my favorite series. If you’ve got a young reader at home, consider any of these series (with parental discretion, of course).
The Black Stallion - There’s a much bigger focus on horse racing than ever there was in the movie, but the descriptions of the horses and the races are timeless.
The Original Oz Books - Another series where nobody seems to know anything but the movies, the original 14 books by L. Frank Baum are an exercise in truly bizarre, anything-goes, story-telling.
The Chronicles of Prydain - Like a shorter, Welsh version of Lord of the Rings only with fewer talking trees and more crunchings and munchings.
The Tripods Trilogy - As I’ve mentioned before, this reimagining of War of the Worlds only humanity lost was a formative series for me. It remains a heartbreaking read but a deeply engaging one.
From the Archives:
In this week’s essay, I mentioned that the modern YA novel shares a lot in common with the classic Bildungsroman novel. And if you’re wondering just what that means, you’re in luck. Just about a year ago, I wrote an entire article about it on this very site. Here you go:
Like every other kid of my generation, I saw the Black Stallion through one of Disney’s earlier forays into t.v. When I mentioned this to our librarian, she steered me towards the books. Devoured them. To this day, I have fond memories of going through the encyclopedia looking up all the different kinds of horses and races.
Make no mistake, this is the single best part of my weird, patched-together career; reading with kids is one of the most rewarding things an adult can do. Not only will it teach you to see differently, it will break your heart in the most revelatory ways.
Unless it’s “don’t date the shiny vampire boy who’s several centuries older than you but acts like he’s ten years younger than you.”
I am speaking in very broad strokes of course. There is always something that the hero is not meant to know. That’s called plot development!
And middle-aged ones, too.
Once you get past the easy ones like act, you’re suddenly faced with a plethora of five-letter words that have never appeared anywhere except Words With Friends like bract, epact, and eruct, before settling into the slightly more comfortable six and seven letter words like expect and subject. Ending in /ct/. Honestly.
One.
Quick refresher - contronyms are words like cleave which can mean two opposite things at the same time. So you can cleave two things together, making them one, or you can cleave something apart, turning two things into one. Not just verbs either, think about words like bill which can be a payment or an invoice or the Spice Girls, who are either extremely cool or extremely kitschy.
When I typed that query into Google I got nothing but legal scholarship sites returned.
Such an interesting and captivating read! I'm glad I didn't forget to come back to read it.
I have to admit I read it a second time, searching for the explanation of "blech," as I also didn't know it. 😅
Really enjoyed reading about your library explorations…Judy Blume was a favorite, probably because she didn’t shirk away from what were at the time, taboo topics for young people.
And mulct? Weird. Mulcted worse. 😛