One Step Now Education

July 26, 2024

exfoliator

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Do you tweet? Do you enjoy the cesspool that is Twitter? (Now, there’s a great word to investigate, cesspool!)

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Before Christmas I watched an entire thread of people going back and forth about skin care. The originator was surprised by their child’s request for skin care products for Christmas given their age. A few other parents commiserated and then others jumped in lambasting (another one!) the commiserators, congratulating the children for caring about their skin at such a young age. After reading some comments on moisturizers and nighttime routine, I had had enough.

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Until I had a student who brought up exfoliator one day. I’m not sure that was a great idea, knowing what a word nerd I am. They happily indulged me in finding out about the word.

Meaning

What is this word’s meaning and how does the word function?

An exfoliator is a product “designed to remove dead skills from the skin’s surface.” Of course my student knew what it meant and explained it to me. It is always interesting when a student is more of an “expert” than I am on a subject, and they have a chance to teach me.

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It has an equivalent form in exfoliant. Forms of words can appear and disappear throughout time as one form or another gains prominence or in popularity for many reasons. I occasionally enjoy looking at ngrams, even though I’ve heard they may not be terribly accurate. Ngrams use a corpus of works to obtain a word’s frequency. For instance, Google’s feature uses Google Books. Therefore, a word’s frequency may be different depending on the ngram you are looking at, but in general the rise and fall may be similar.

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The Google Ngram for exfoliator is flat until the 1920s before it goes flat again. There is a spike in the 1940s before another drop that doesn’t pick up again until the 1980s. There is then a steep climb to the present day.

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Interesting, the Google Ngram for exfoliant began seeing a rise in the 1910s but remained mostly flat until 1980 when we see the same sharp increase. The term took a small dip in the early 2000s until there was another bump around 2010 and a fall to about the same level as it was in the early 2000s.

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Most of us were around for this rise in both terms. Why did exfoliant take a dip while exfoliator continues to climb?

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Only her dermatologist knows for sure?

Structure

What are the elements that make up this word’s structure?

My student gamely played along as I wrote down the word and asked, “Do you see any prefixes or suffixes here?”

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“<-or>,” they dutifully replied. My student is very familiar with this routine.

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I write exfoliate/ + or. I might ask the student to write the word sum, but I’m gauging our interactions and I’m just happy at this moment there is a glimmer of compliance with responding to my questions.

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“What does that suffix do?”

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I don’t typically ask what affixes “mean” so much as what they “do,” because suffixes often provide grammatical usage, or a function, to a word, rather than a lexical “meaning.”

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No response.

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“Sometimes we see this suffix on words like doctor and investigator…” I offer.

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“Oh yeah, they tell us what people do.”

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Good enough, I think. “That’s exactly what it does. They’re called agent suffixes, like <-er> in teacher and farmer. Or <-ist> in florist and scientist.”

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“What about exfoliate?” I prodded. “Any prefixes or suffixes in that one?”

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I thought for sure they would catch the <ex>, but they responded with the <-ate> first before noting the <ex>.

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ex + foli + ate/ + or

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“What do you think of that?” I ask my student.

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“That’s good.”

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The entry in Etymonline was then checked. We see there is a root in Latin, exfoliare, a verb with a denotation “to strip of leaves,” that was built on the elements ex- and folium, or “leaf.” We can remove the <-um> from this noun to get our English base <foli>.

Relatives

What are the word’s relatives and history?

My student’s attention is waning fast, so I simply cut and paste the root folium into the search engine of Etymonline to come up with a few relatives we can talk about.

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The first word that comes up is folio. I ask my student about a portfolio, but they aren’t sure what that is. I explain it quickly and move on to the next word.

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Remember that when you search for relatives this way that Etymonline’s search engine is going to return every entry that refers to folium, even if it is not the root of the word. Therefore, it is upon us to look through the entry and determine this is the case.

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The next entry is the PIE root for folium. A Proto-Indo-European root has been reconstructed and cannot serve as evidence of a morphological relative. Nevertheless it is the source of many etymological relatives. I see other words with a potential <foli> base to add to our list.

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What about foliage?

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They’re unsure of that word too. I explain that people use it to talk about the leaves on trees mostly, especially in the fall when they are turning color.

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I quickly jump on phyllo– and write it down for them. I remembered a conversation we had once had where they mentioned they loved baklava.

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“How would you read this word?” I ask.

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They do well, even if they give the <y> a “long <i>” sound.

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I tell them that phyllo dough is this really thin dough that you see in some foods.

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“Let me show you.”

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We do a quick search for pictures of baklava. When the search loads, my student exclaims, “Hey baklava!” I point out the thin layers of phyllo dough and connect them to the thinness of leaves.

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We could have gone on to discuss other relatives like flower, bloom, or bleed, but this wasn’t our goal for the day. It was an interesting detour that led to my student’s engagement and subsequent participation in the lesson I had planned for the day.

Graphemes

What can the pronunciation of the word teach us about its graphemes and phonology?

Our investigation stopped there, but after considering the relatives, we may have looked at the phonology of the word, its pronunciation, its stress patterns, its grapheme-phoneme correspondences.

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Honestly, there’s nothing terribly interesting that isn’t expected. Perhaps a student could confuse whether the word ends with <-er> or <-or>. Some texts say that if the root is Latin, then pick <-or>, and whereas an agent suffix <-or> can have a base from Latin, the reverse isn’t necessarily true. The suffix <-er> is still active and we can assign it to bases from Latin like in manager and server.

Next Steps

Where do I go next?

What other competing terms might you and your students use the Ngram to investigate their frequency?

Studying agent suffixes is always a great investigation.

Instead of a matrix, what if you and your students assembled a “picture album” of a word family? Certainly this investigation would lend itself well with pictures of autumn splendor and rich desserts.

For many of my students, this is where I start. I talk with them and find out their interests. Inevitably, these conversations lead to interesting words. Over the course of our investigations, students slowly start to come around. For some, it takes longer than others. For some, like this student, we occasionally have to circle back.

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Where you might start with your students?

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Stay curious,

Brad

One Step Now Education

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