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It gave no etymology, unfortunately
That virtual font of etymological information, the AHD, gives
From carburet, carbide, from French carbure, from Latin carbo, carbon.
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"children of poverty start school with a vocabulary of only 10,000 words, compared with 40,000 for kids from middle-class homes."
I still question the validity of those 40,000 word vocabulary estimates. (guess-timates)
A wise question. The following by Sebastian Wren, Ph.D. (not further identified) differs from all of the conflicting numbers noted in this thread:
By the time a child enters school, that child has learned between 2,500 and 5,000 words. For the first few years of formal education, an average child will learn about 3,000 new words per year. That's 8 words per day!
.....However, these numbers describe averages. Some children enter school knowing as much as twice the number of words that their peers know. This discrepancy in vocabulary size correlates very strongly with reading achievement. Further, once a child becomes a successful reader, text becomes the primary source of vocabulary development. Thus, as years of education pass, the discrepancy between the vocabulary size of some students over their peers can grow from two-fold to over four-fold."
Elsewhere the same author makes the point more generally (and also gives us a new term): Research has revealed an extremely dangerous phenomenon that has been dubbed the "Matthew Effect." The term comes from the line in the Bible that essentially says that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Over time, the gap between children who have well developed literacy skills and those who do not gets wider and wider. (emphasis added)
The latter article, titled "Ten Myths of Reading Instruction", appear to be very interesting; admittedly I have not read it thoroughly.
[Note for links: The links have characters which prohibit "makeashorterlink" from functioning properly. I omit them, lest your screens go wide. To find them, just google-searches snippets of the quoted language
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Here is short link to "Ten Myths of Reading Instruction": http://www.sedl.org/reading/topics/myths.pdfI agree with author that phonemes are extremely important tool, but disagree with his skepticism about dyslexia having a genetic basis. He didn't say a word about vocabulary.
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Number 5 was especially interesting to me, Dr. Bill. It is, in part:
"Skilled reading involves using syntactic and semantic cues to "guess" words..." A man named Ken Goodman did a dissertation on this assertion, which the author says he and a partner debunked--er, disproved. One of the author's sticking points in Mr. Goodman's theory was, essentially, what constitutes a "good" reader.
My interest was caught by this one because I do a fair amount of this type of guesswork. Although not a 'speed reader', I do read fairly fast. If my glance notes that, say, a word of approximately seven letters begins with ri--and ends with --ly, I will likely assume the word is rightly (depending on context), and sometimes I do miss things. When I was helping in elementary classrooms, I saw some kids doing the same thing; they'd make a guess based on the beginning of a word.
I wonder if this isn't partially innate, and partially based on experience. With as much reading experience as I have now, I know that the odds are heavily in favor of a particular word being in a particular place. To use my example, the odds tell me that if I see the phrase, "... and ri---ly so", the middle word is rightly. And I think it is possible, and likely, that some children** see a word that begins with the letter, say m, and think, "Oh, that's got to be that word that I learned the other day that begins with m". We extrapolate for the future based on our experiences: what we know. An example of this came from my son: when he was just learning to talk, we went to the zoo. The first animal we came to was a goat. And to him, every animal we saw thereafter was a goat, so matter how wildly its appearance varied from the original.
As to innateness, I meant something I've posted about before: we seem to be hard-wired so that we remember first things (letters of words fits this post) easiest, last things second-easiest, and have a hard time with the middles. Think of the alphabet, and the multiplication tables.
**I have almost no experience in helping adults learn to read. Does anyone know if adults may be less likely to jump to a conclusion about what a word is?
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dr. bill, thanks for the link.
Of the two articles I cited, only the first talks specifically about vocabulary. It notes that children who enter school ahead of their peers (in vocabulary) tend over the years to get farther and farther ahead in literacy.
The second article makes this same point that initial variances in literacy (however caused) tend to widen over the years of children's education.
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I have almost no experience in helping adults learn to read. Does anyone know if adults may be less likely to jump to a conclusion about what a word is?
I don't know about adults, but one of the high-schoolers I have in an SAT-prep class does this continually when reading aloud. He seems to follow the "see the beginning and end, guess the middle" approach you mentioned, reading "miserly" as "miserably" and such. I'm not yet sure if he only does this when reading aloud (the added pressure of being "on stage" makes many normally good readers horrible at reading aloud), but it could be a big liability for him on the test if he does it when reading to himself, as well.
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