I loved my ninth-grade English teacher. Miss Boyd was a paragon of beauty: an exquisite face in dark-rimmed glasses and a cool car.

A short time later, she got married and broke my heart, but not before teaching me a love of words that lingers still.

Words such as ennui, ameliorate, embellish, braggadocio, exacerbate, fulminate, epitomize. It's bizarre how many are locked away in my head to this day.

Miss Boyd's output was prolific: 20 new words each week, written on the blackboard along with their pronunciations and definitions.

The class's word itinerary was a tour of nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Our redundant act of copying them into our notebooks helped cement them into our brains. If some mental calamity occurred, we had handwritten backup for instant verification.

Memorizing words wasn't a lavish exercise, but if we were diligent in our studies, it paid off.

The strange cargo those notebooks held even encouraged us to tackle other words.

For instance, when we read Hamlet and Miss Boyd delegated students to read lines, it didn't perplex us to learn of the prince's intentions to have the king "hoist with his own petard" -- destroyed by his own actions (literally, blown up by his own bomb.")

Our class was a typical high school village.

Some freshmen were boisterous, others restrained; some were elated to learn, others painfully mesmerized by the memorizing. Some kids were loquacious, others frugal with their classroom participation. Mixed in with the scholars were the pretentious and the maladjusted, the cynics and the skeptics.

It didn't matter, though.

Miss Boyd had a flair for making words fun, and even if I hadn't cherished her, I would still recall everything she taught us.

Down the hall from English class, my world history teacher was just as enthusiastic, giving us extra credit when we came across words outside of class that we had studied while reading about all those Greeks, Romans and Egyptians.

I had a 105 average at the end of the year.

Fortunately, there is a cadre of teachers who, to this day, adhere to the practice of using word lists to open young mental doors.

I know of a fifth-grade class right now that has been asked to find 27 such words in daily life.

How many of those words have you picked up from what you've just read?

Reach Glynn Moore at (706) 823-3419 or glynn.moore@augustachronicle.com.