3.1 Sepulcher

When/Where: I'm currently reading The Cheshire Cheese Cat: A Dickens of a Tale (2011) by Carmen Agra Deedy & Randall Wright. While this book is written for middle-schoolers, I found that it had interesting and rich words sprinkled through out the text. The sentence which contained this word read: "Where secrets are concerned, I am a veritable sepulcher." (pg. 25). I think that this word is a used as a metaphor to explain someone that can keep a secret safe.

Level of Familiarity: I had never heard of this word before!

What it Means: Google states that a sepulcher is: "a small room or monument, cut in rock or built of stone, in which a dead person is laid or buried." The picture to the right is meant to represent the meaning behind sepulcher. In fact this box could be made into a sepulcher if one buried a favorite pet in it and threw away the key. Try googling "sepulcher", I dare you! Believe me, this is a much more pleasant way to represent the term!

Reflection: Ah ha! I was correct in my prediction. I will say that this word was not one that was extremely challenging. That is, in thinking about vocabulary instruction, if my own students were reading this book I wouldn't spend time explicitly teaching the word, the context helps one infer a reasonable meaning. Sepulcher does make sense in this context because tombs tend not to be open once the are closed, keeping whatever is inside hidden away, which is similar to how a secret is supposed to be kept. Even though I could deduce the definition of the term, I chose this word because I was surprised to see a term that I had never heard before in a "children's" book .