A Useful Definition

I was perusing dictionary.com, my go-to website for words, when I saw an article that caught my eyes.  "How well would you do on the ACT?: Thousands of students who took the ACT placement test this weekend had to know these words. Do you?"  So of course I took a look.

The word list was not terribly impressive to me.  The majority of them are words I would hope the majority of people know.  Like, even if people didn't use the word 'covert', I would hope they at least knew what it meant.  I could understand people not knowing 'languid', only because it is not terribly common (though it is one of those words whose meaning is how it sounds).

While perusing the list, I noticed that one of the words is 'haughty'.  It's a nice word.  For me, it's one of those ones that I can use in a sentence and I can use to describe something that is haughty, but I can't always give it a succinct definition.

Later on in the list, I see the word 'cavalier'.  The very first definition for the word: Haughty.

I was taken aback.  Who has the gall to give you a vocabulary word which people apparently need to study for, and then give another vocabulary word whose definition is the first word?  What a haughty action!

Defining words is not always easy.  Sometimes we understand a word so well that finding the words to describe it is more difficult than knowing how to use it.  Still, defining words is how you explain and teach them to the uninitiated.  If you are going to do so, though, add the extra effort to come up with a useful definition.  No point defining an unknown word with another unknown word.