Seven Ways to Improve Your Vocabulary

Update: I've added several books to the reading list.

Whether you're preparing for the ACT or SAT, working toward an A in AP English, or writing your college application essays, a stronger vocabulary will make you a better reader and writer. Here are seven ways to work on your vocabulary:

1. Use the dictionary, but AVOID FLASH CARDS.

A truly nuanced vocabulary isn't something you can create by pure memorization. Good writers like to play with words, so you have to be familiar with how each word is used in a variety of contexts.

Watch the video below and then answer the vocabulary question that follows:



When Mrs. Bennett tells Mary to "find some useful employment," the word employment most nearly means
(a) paid work
(b) trade
(c) profession
(d) task

To answer this question, stick each of the choices into Mrs. Bennett's sentence to see which one works:

"Mary, put that away at once. Find some useful _________."

The first three choices don't work because in the context of the story, Mrs. Bennett is trying to get the house ready for some unexpected guests, and she needs Mary to help tidy up. She's not offering any money, so choice A isn't an option. She's not asking Mary to find a useful career, either, so choices B and C are out. The word task fits: it's consistent with Mrs. Bennett's implied request to clean the house up right away.

Choices A, B, and C are the three definitions that Google's dictionary provides for the word employment. Choice D isn't one of Google's definitions, but it's the correct answer!

ACT and SAT vocab questions look a lot like the one we just did. The most obvious answer is almost always wrong; it's there to trap people who memorize definitions using flash cards. The tests' writers are trying to see if you really understand what you read.

The dictionary can help, since there is some overlap between the meanings of the words employment and task. Just make sure you pay attention to the author's meaning as opposed to your own preconceived notions!

2. Enjoy what you read.

I can't emphasize this enough. Your brain has to draw connections between what you're learning and what you already know, and it's not going to do that very effectively if you're bored.

What you read doesn't matter very much as long as you really enjoy it. Just make sure that, on average, there's at least one vocabulary word you can learn on each page.

I keep a stash of Post-It notes inside the cover of whatever book I'm currently reading. If I run across a word I can't figure out in context, I put a Post-It under the word and use Google to look it up when I have time.

I went to the library last week and flipped through copies of some of the books in the list below. I've put them roughly in order from easiest to hardest. At the hardest level, there are words that even I don't know. You can always find something interesting to learn no matter what your current reading level is.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Mildred Taylor)

Hatchet (Gary Paulsen)
The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
The Joy Luck Club (Amy Tan)
The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins)
Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains (Annie Cheney)
Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption (Ben Mezrich)
The Great Beanie Baby Bubble by Zac Bissonnette
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey)
The Perfect Score Project: One Mother's Journey to Discover the Secrets of the SAT (Debbie Stier)
White Fang (Jack London)
Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut)

The Art of Non-Conformity (Chris Guillebeau)

Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts (Annie Duke)
How We Decide (Jonah Lehrer)
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)

SuperFreakonomics (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)
Next: The Future Just Happened (Michael Lewis)
While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis by Roger Lowenstein
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (J.K. Rowling)
Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (Michael Lewis)
Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt (Michael Lewis)
The Quants (Scott Patterson)
The Blind Side (Michael Lewis)
Moneyball (Michael Lewis)

Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare (Ryan Dezember)
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Michael Lewis)
Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri)
Jurassic Park (Michael Crichton)
33 Questions about American History You're Not Supposed to Ask (Thomas Woods)
Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy (Jostein Gaardner)
Church Refugees (Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope)
Animals in Translation (Temple Grandin)
When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (Roger Lowenstein)
The Great Depression: A Diary (Benjamin Roth)
Wealth, War, and Wisdom (Barton Biggs)
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (John Carreyrou)
The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution (Gregory Zuckerman)

Common Sense: The Investor's Guide to Equality, Opportunity, and Growth (Joel Greenblatt)
In Defense of Troublemakers: The Power of Dissent in Life and Business (Charlan Nemeth)

The Undoing Project (Michael Lewis)
The Great Gatsby (F. Scott. Fitzgerald)
The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis)
The Great Depression: A Diary (Benjamin Roth)
Cheaper by the Dozen (Frank and Ernestine Gilbreth)
The Hobbit (J.R. Tolkien)

Superforecasting (Philip Tetlock)

Anticancer: A New Way of Life (David Servan-Schreiber)

Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don't Have To (David Sinclair and Matthew LaPlante)
The Construction of Modern Science (Richard Westfall)
Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) This edition of the book includes definitions of the vocabulary words.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn)

You can use magazines and blogs, too, as long as there's at least one vocabulary word you can learn on each page.

Newsweek
The New York Times
The Wall Street Journal - This is my personal favorite!
The Economist
Scientific journals: If you're interested in these, find a science blog on a topic you like and download the articles it recommends.

3. Use Professor Word.

Professor Word is a tool that automatically pulls up SAT and ACT words as you're reading on the Internet. If you click on a word, the tool will offer several definitions for it.

You'll be able to literally see how good writing relies on interesting, offbeat definitions of otherwise "easy" words.

4. Listen to audiobooks in the car.

Audiobooks aren't quite as effective as the printed page, but they still offer a way to turn otherwise wasted driving time into something useful.

The app Podcast Republic searches for podcasts and plays them on your Android phone. It also works with audiobooks you've saved on your phone's memory card. (Overcast is a great podcast app for the iPhone.)

Here are a few podcasts I've enjoyed. (I didn't go to Stanford intending to become interested in combining science, technology, and business, but it looks like the school had a good influence on me.)

The Science of Success Podcast
This podcast focuses on using science to help you become successful in life. Its evidence-based focus sets it apart from typical business success and pop psychology shows.

2000 Books for Ambitious Entrepreneurs (Mani Vaya)

Vaya's podcast focuses on recent research about business and psychology.

Advanced Worldview Analysis (Dr. Ronald Nash)

Dr. Ronald Nash provides one particular point of view on how the Bible interacts with the world's philosophies.

History of Philosophy and Christian Thought (Dr. Ronald Nash)

Dr. Nash teaches the history of philosophy from a Christian point of view.

Seth Godin's Startup School

This is a series of excerpts from Godin's seminars on developing a creative business.

The Meb Faber Show
This is an excellent research-based podcast about what works in investing and what doesn't.

The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History Podcast
If you find the SAT's American History passages to be challenging, this is the podcast to listen to. It covers the American Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, and abolitionism. The only major topic on the SAT this podcast doesn't cover is early feminism. The author, Thomas Woods, is a senior fellow in history at the libertarian Mises Institute, so he tilts overtly toward individual and state rights rather than toward a large federal government.

The American Military History Podcast
This podcast takes the interesting approach of telling American history through the eyes of people who served in the military. Its focus on engagements keeps the episodes interesting.

It's History Podcast
This started out as a series of episodes covering the history of the Cold War and has since expanded to a variety of topics.

Pride and Prejudice (written by Jane Austen and read by Elizabeth Klett)
This is the most beautiful rendition of Austen's work that I've ever heard.

MIT courses on various topics
These courses are for advanced students who want to "sit in" on college classes.

5. Watch TV with the subtitles turned on.

Some shows are better than others. Generally speaking, shows that describe a unfamiliar world use advanced vocabulary to tell the viewer what's going on. Science fiction, fantasy, documentaries, and movie adaptations of classic books are all in this category. Music videos also work if the songs are very sophisticated.

If possible, watch with the subtitles on! Reading and writing happen with actual words.

Science Fiction


Fantasy


Documentaries


Classics


Sophisticated Music

6. Become friends with the "smart kids."

Peer pressure works. I usually consider mob psychology to be a bad thing, but you can sometimes harness it to push yourself to do something amazing.

If you go to a good college, you'll make friends with intelligent, ambitious people. They'll prod you to learn faster, work harder, and accomplish more than you would have on your own. Your vocabulary will improve as a result. Why not start that process today?

7. Find a tutor with good grammar and an excellent vocabulary.

Every section of the ACT requires you to be a good reader. ACT Math has word problems, and the Science section is one huge word problem. Recent changes to the SAT have made it even more reading-dependent than the ACT.

A good tutor is the ultimate "smart kid." You'll pick up strong reading and writing skills that will carry you through classes, standardized tests, and college application essays. In the process, you might even become an independent thinker and an effective communicator.

The best way to get into top schools is, after all, to be what they're looking for.

Read More

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble (Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute)

Here's the vocabulary list for The Great Beanie Baby Bubble (Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute) by Zac Bissonnette.

ISBN 978-1-59184-602-4
Bissonnette, Zac. The Great Beanie Baby Bubble (Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute). Penguin, 2015.

Representative Quotes

"That the speculative bubble in Beanie Babies took place in tandem with the Internet bubble suggests that the cultural forces that were alchemizing Internet stocks had the same effect on Beanie Babies. They rose in an era of unreality defined by magical thinking; as economist Dr. Robert Shiller writes in Irrational Exuberance: 'Speculative market expansions have often been associated with popular perceptions that the future is brighter or less uncertain than it was in the past.' They also, Shiller notes, have a way of clustering around century turns - as if the prospect of going from '99 to '00 is so fantastic as to make all things seem possible. In the new millennium, the residents of America's high culture thought, the Internet would change everything, making everyone who bought Internet stocks rich, no matter how much they paid. Those in the lower culture adapted that optimism to a belief in the investment potential of stuffed animals, and it's hard to say which view was proven more wrong." (p. 6)

"The collectibles business preyed on all the behavioral fallacies that cost investors money: our overreliance on past performance as a predictor of future returns, our tendency to have an inflated concept of the value of things we own (known as the endowment effect), and our tendency toward movement in herds." (p. 72)

"When I look back, the one thing I remember so much about Beanie Babies was how they made people feel so warm and fuzzy inside.... Then it just became people who saw dollar signs - that was by far the majority of it at the height." (p. 73)

"Gernady... was the first retailer to produce a checklist of all the Beanies he knew of, current and retired.... Give a person who is genetically hardwired for collecting a checklist and he'll attempt to buy everything on it." (p. 78) "My downfall was the checklists.... Once you have a checklist, you don't look at what you have. You look at what you don't have." (p. 89)

"The rise of teddy bears paralleled the rise of industrialization and the rise of the child as a person seen as worthy of pampering. Between 1880 and 1910, the percentage of the American labor force that worked in farming fell from 49 percent to 31 percent, and as the population moved away from the realities of life with animals, it romanticized them in its children's toys." (p. 80)

"Once people could buy them for $5 and flip them for two to five times as much, the speed of the fad's spread multiplied - because humans have an insatiable need to brag. The idea of making money reselling stuffed animals was so bizarre - so fantastic - that everyone who did it told everyone they knew about it. Even with relatively tiny volume, stories about profits on Beanies spread word virally of an otherwise unremarkable product." (p. 91)

" 'If other people start collecting, your collection increases in value.' While consumer goods have always gained popularity through word of mouth, word of a profitable investment always spreads more quickly." (p. 93)

"[Gallagher] was essentially making up prices based on the pieces that seemed to be the hardest to find. She tried to cull values based on what Gernady was charging and what the collectors in America Online's collectibles chat room were saying, but there was no transparent market yet. In the beginning she simply decreed that most retired Beanie Babies were worth $10 or $20 each, and then watched in amazement as the market went there. Gallagher, with her own collection, naturally had a strong incentive to be optimistic about her estimates. Among the small group of Chicago suburbs collectors, the price lists that Gallagher - and then the two Beckys - put out became the market." (p. 94)

"In the tulip mania of the 1630s, the Semper Augustus bulb was the rarest and most coveted - and helped to spread the burgeoning market for tulips to its sad and inevitable conclusion: naive newcomers paid too much for tulips that weren't even a little bit rare. Just as the legitimate business model of eBay drove demand for shares of hundreds of other Internet stocks without business models, it was the discovery of hard-to-find oddities that started to turn harmless toy collecting into something truly insane." (p. 96)

"So now beanie Babies are big business, with grown men and women fighting over them and paying thousands of dollars for certain rare models, such as Peanut the Royal Blue Elephant (not to be confused with Peanut the LIGHT Blue Elephant, which only a total loser would pay thousands of dollars for)." (Dave Barry, p. 97)

"The self-styled market experts stoked the idea that in the new Beanies there was the possibility of finding examples that would experience the same appreciation patterns the earlier ones had. The reasoning was of course flawed: by the time Beanie Babies had caught on, the Chinese factories were pumping them out in huge quantities - although the diffused distribution masked just how many Ty was selling.... Warner knew that keeping small numbers of Beanies in many stores was the key to the crazy, telling a reporter in 1996, 'This thing could grow and be around for many years just as long as I don't take the easy road and sell it to a mass merchant who's going to put it in bins.' " (p. 98-99)

"Had the initial sales of Beanie Babies been stronger, it's unlikely that a crazy could ever have developed. There would have been no oddities and limited-production rarities for collectors to hunt for - and for which to pay the high prices that would spread word of an investment opportunity. As the Chicago Tribune reported, 'Start taking about Beanies, and just about everybody knows somebody who financed a wedding, a vacation, a new van or what have you with the proceeds of Beanie sales.' In his 1978 book, Manias, Panics and Crashes, the economist Charles Kindleberger explained the self-perpetuating feeding frenzy that develops when speculators start making money: 'There is nothing so disturbing to one's well-being and judgment as to see a friend get rich.' " (p. 99)

"The idea of people making money with Beanie Babies was too good for fact-checking.... It is perhaps no coincidence that 'the history of speculative bubbles begins roughly with the advent of newspapers. Although the news media - newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media, along with their new outlets on the Internet - present themselves as detached observers of market events, they are themselves an integral part of these events.... The media actively shape public attention and categories of thought, and they create an environment within which the speculative market events we see are played out,'  writes Dr. Shiller." (p. 100)

"In the days of the Internet bubble, a sexy story was often more important than a viable business model. When eBay was looking to raise venture capital money - and later on preparing for its IPO - its dependence on collectors led to eye-rolling among investors and analysts. How could a Web site that was mostly used to help people buy and sell vintage lunch boxes and Beanie Babies possibly be worth $1 billion? As the stock price rose, investors asked whether a company could really sustain a $5 billion valuation with 10 percent of its sales tied to collectors swapping Beanie Babies? Did that mean the market was valuing eBay's business selling Beanie Babies at $500 million?" (p. 123)

"The monthly sales of Beanie Babies on eBay constituted about 0.04 percent of the Beanie Babies Ty was shipping each month. But the prices they were fetching on eBay helped drive sales volume by a huge multiplier. People who had collections could go online and see that they were in the money, which made stocking up on more retail-priced Beanies an easy decision. The media was full of stories about people flipping Beanie Babies for a profit - but most people were not flipping them for a profit. Most people were hoarding them for long-term investment.

"Just as relatively minor discoveries of gold had fueled the gold rush of 1849, it only took $500,000 per month in eBay sales to help drive, at Beanie Babies' height, $200 million per month in retail sales.... 'People don't think in terms of information. They think in terms of narratives.' The stories of people buying $5 Beanie Babies and then selling them to pay for cars spread of the word of Beanie Babies more efficiently than any deliberate marketing strategy could have." (p. 127)

"My daughter who is ten thinks I am addicted.... Yes, we are behind on our house payment, and I beg my husband to buy me 'oh, just one'... My fifteen year old son has cerebral palsy. I tell myself that he can use the proceeds from these Beanies to help himself maintain a decent lifestyle after I am gone." (p. 141)

"There were a few people who became millionaires in less than two years by spreading the idea that never, under any circumstances, ever, should anyone let a child touch a Beanie Baby. Beanies, they said, were destined for greater things." (p. 141)

"First some new thing comes along and captures the public's imagination. Then everyone starts making money. After that, some person of average intelligence is held up as a genius." (p. 142)

"All speculative manias rely on self-proclaimed and media-anointed soothsayers for amplification, and Beanie Babies were no different. The craze never could have inflated as much as it did without the implied credibility that came from the books, magazines, and charismatic prognosticators extolling the toys' investment value." (p. 143)

"When Ty Inc. won on summary judgment in a case against one obscure publisher, it was awarded all the profits - an astonishing $1.36 million plus more than $200,000 in interest on a few low-budget, poorly researched exploitation books that were not even close to being among the most popular of the Beanie guides. It is often said of the gold rush that the people who got rich were the shovel dealers who profited from the greed of the forty-niners. With Beanie Babies, most of the lasting personal fortunes came from selling books and tag protectors, not from speculating in plush." (p. 144)

"The mavens and publishers, even if they weren't themselves Beanie dealers, had powerful incentives to keep prices high.... 'A price guide is only valuable as long as you can raise prices. The premise of selling second-, third-, and fourth-edition price guides is to show people how much more valuable their stuff has become.' Just as business news viewership tanks after a market crash, no one is interested in buying a price guide that tells them their stuff is worth less than it was last year. Robert L. Miller, who published price guides for the collectible Hummel figures for decades, solved that problem by simply raising his value estimates by 10 percent every year....

Every current Beanie Baby available for retail for $5 was projected to be worth at least $40 by 2007. Fox bought virtually all the Beanie Babies he used for the photos from Peggy Gallagher, paying her, by his own admission, inflated prices and then using those prices as the basis for his valuations. 'It was obscene what I was charging him.... He didn't really care about the actual true pricing. He cared more about selling a gazillion books.

" 'It's our own personal 'theory of scarcity' that at least 90% of almost everything gets lost, stolen or destroyed within 10 years,' the Foxes explain in the book. 'Why should Beanies defy the laws of human natures? The point is, only a tiny percentage of Beanies will be sealed in Zip-Loc bags and treated with TLC until the year 2007, no matter how well-intentioned their owners... Whoever is lucky (and smart) enough to hang on to some top grade Beanie Babies for the long haul will be the future supplier for tomorrow's collectors.

" 'If this hobby continues to grow, as we believe it will, 10 years from now even today's 'shocking' high prices may seem low.... After all, people were shocked when Picasso's paintings surpassed the million-dollar mark. Recently one sold for $25 million.'

"The Foxes also provided 'estimates' of how many of each Beanie Baby had been produced, but those guesses turned out to be woefully low - as evidenced by the size of the fortune Warner had accumulated by the time the market crashed. However, the estimates did provide consumers with enough misinformation to make the idea of long-term Beanie scarcity seem plausible." (pp. 145-6)

"Expectations were enormous. McDonald's reported production of one hundred million Teeny Beanie Babies, enough to fill the largest Happy Meal order in history. It was a prediction that there would be enough demand to sell one for every household in America within a span of just a few weeks.... That should have warned consumers that these were unlikely to be scarce enough to appreciate in value, but it didn't....

"Some customers ordered a hundred Happy Meals and asked the cashier to keep the food. Stores received hundreds of calls her hour....

"Two weeks into a planned five-week phenomenon, McDonald's took out ads to apologize and announce that it was ending the giveaway early because it had run out of product. As for the TV commercials promoting Teenie Beanies, the company canceled those after just a couple of days, worried that massive crowds were putting employees' safety in jeopardy....

"The McDonald's promotion brought massive mainstream buzz to a product with distribution only outside the mainstream. It's a combination that hardly ever happens, and it amplified an already enormous imbalance between demand and supply - the equivalent of buying Super Bowl ads to promote a church bake sale....

"Three days after the McDonald's giveaway ended, the Chicago Cubs were in the midst of one of the worst seasons in team history... but they had a special event that day: a Beanie Baby giveaway that 37,958 paying spectators showed up for.... Aside from the Cubs' first home game in 1988... the giveaway had done more to drive ticket sales than any event in its history." (pp. 156-160)

"By 1998 a USA Weekend poll found that 64 percent of Americans owned at least one Beanie Baby." (p. 163)

"As popular as Beanie Babies were, Biank had to stop using them for therapy. These particular stuffed animals were now too valuable to be given to children whose parents were dying of cancer." (p. 164)

"The continuing escalating demand and prices were driven by one of the most fundamental fallacies identified by behavioral economists: humans extrapolate trends and assume that historical price-appreciation patterns will continue even when it is future demand, not past returns, that will impact prices in the long run....

"Far from eliciting skepticism about an overheating market, inflated prices serve to lure more investors in....

"Just like the mutual fund managers who resisted Internet stocks until the worst possible moment, some of the flea market vendors who had been smart enough to avoid Beanies in the early days jumped on the bandwagon just as the craze peaked.

"Manias are often remembered for the peak - the most spectacular period of a frenzy that seemed to have come out of nowhere. Yet in every case it's the slow growth in the beginning, from a tiny base, which ignites the stories that spread the excitement. The year after most outside experts predicted the Beanie Baby fad had already peaked, Ty's wholesale shipments doubled again - and prices on the secondary market continue to climb. It was too late to get any of the really rare Beanies at bargain prices; the Chicago women, whose credibility had increased as the doubers' had diminished, already had those. The ones collectors were clamoring to buy in gift shops were arriving from China by the tens of millions.

"As Rinker was warning, it was the worst possible time to start collecting Beanie Babies, so naturally, more people than ever started collecting Beanie Babies." (pp. 165-7)

"The rising volume of listings on eBay, which had initially contributed to the excitement of Beanie collecting, was now making it easier for collectors to find the Beanies they were missing. The market had become more transparent, and price guide publishers had lost their ability to impact prices. Now you could see values in real time, and any slowdown in growth could instantly stoke pessimism." (p. 171)

"By 1999 [the fraction of Beanies being sold to speculators] was nearing 100 percent, and the only thing that seemed to bring Beanie collectors together was greed. One former Ty sales rep, who once traded a single rare Beanie Baby for a set of braces for her daughter, recalls that as much money as she was making, her visits to retailers had become dark and depressing by 1999. 'I was in a store in South Bend, Indiana, and there were these women who could not afford shoes for their children, but they were carting wheelbarrows full of Beanie Babies.' " (p. 176)

"In Sherman Oaks, Calfornia, a masked man walked into a gift shop with a gun, ordered everybody to the ground, and broke a display case to steal forty Beanie Babies valued at a total of $5,000.... 'He didn't want the cash register... all he wanted was the Beanie Babies.' " (p. 177)

"Even in a trailer park in Elkins, West Virginia, people wanted Beanie Babies. Without the wealth to speculate in the stock market, spending $50 on plush was their connection to the so-called new economy." (p. 178)

"Warner knew that things were coming to an end. He had always said that as long as kids were fighting over Beanie Babies that his business would be find, but now there were enough Beanies being shipped to eliminate the need for fighting - and it was only adults who cared about Beanie Babies anymore anyway.

"Speculative bubbles rely on constant upward movement; once the momentum slows, the bubble collapses. By 1999 every single person who could become a Beanie Baby collector already was one. With no prospects for an influx of increased demand, prices stagnated because there was nothing else for them to do. Once casual collectors could no longer count on quick price appreciation, they dropped out - and then prices fell as the market contracted, driving out still more collectors." (p. 187)

"Warner's previously exacting standards of quality seemed to have disappeared. 'They'll buy it!.. I could put the Ty heart on manure and they'd buy it!'

" 'Ty came to believe that he was a genius, and that every idea he had was brilliant.... After the Beanie mania had produced huge financial results, he focused on the money rather than the people.' " (p. 189)

"That's always what happens after a mania ends. There is some cause that everyone points to... and the intrinsic impermanence is cast aside." (p. 196)

"The same capacity for delusion that fueled the bubble at its height allowed its participants both to maintain their self-esteem after it was over and to fail to learn anything from it. Few of the craze's acolytes acknowledge its insanity even in hindsight. If the mass retirement announcement had not happened, they all seem to believe, the Beanie craze might still be on." (p. 197)

"All you could do was look at them - except they had a way of looking back at you and making you think about all the money you had spent on them. The only thing you could really do with them is brag about how many you had. And no matter how many you had, there was always somebody who had more." (p. 200)

"Even with Beanies selling (and mostly not selling) at yard sales and flea markets for fifty cents each, Warner wouldn't allow any of them to be valued at less than $5 to $7." (p. 202)

"Ty's sales reps who became millionaires mostly blew through the money on cars, boats, and Internet stocks - profiting from a bubble while oblivious to its inability to last. In the nearly fifteen years since the craze ended, few have come close to the incomes they achieved then." (p. 203)

"Retired soap-opera-star-turned-Beanie-hoarder Chris Robinson started his collection in 1998, at the absolute height of the market. During the decline in 1999 and early 2000, he'd doubled down on his gamble: when local gift shops went out of business, Robinson bought out their Beanie Baby inventories at wholesale prices, fancying himself a value investor. Between that and his earlier days lining up at stores as they unloaded shipments, his investment in Beanies stretched well past the $100,000 mark. Today, much like the stock speculators who simply stopped logging in to their brokerage accounts post-2000, he can't bring himself to go online and check the current values.

" 'Before I die, I guess I have to find out what they're currently worth, Robinson, now in his midseventies, says. 'If it takes twenty years, the kids will all have them. They can spit them up - and play with Beanie Babies. Or sell them...' " (p. 223)

"The implosion of Beanie Babies and the rise of eBay brought the broader collectibles industry to its knees.... 'Ten years earlier, it was difficult to connect with people and find pieces.... There was a perceived value because it was so hard to find that piece. But then people could go on eBay and find five hundred of that piece. That's what killed it.' " (p. 225)

"A few Beanie Babies, the ones that were retired prior to the craze's taking off in 1996, are still worth $50 or $100 - occasionally a few hundred for the rarest pieces, once supposed to be enough to cover the down payment on a McMansion. At least 99.5 percent of the perfectly preserved Beanie Babies from the late 1990s are today worth significantly less than they retailed for." (p. 243)

"The speculative boom for Beanie Babies has resulted in an unsurpassed volume of high-quality, perfectly preserved, monetarily worthless plush animals for children most in need of the comfort of something soft. A few years ago, Warner's sister emptied her closets of the hundreds of Beanie Babies she'd accumulated haphazardly during the craze years - they were made by her brother, after all - and dropped them off at the nearest children's hospital.... Today's kids known them only as toys because they're too young to remember that there was at time when people abandoned their senses over beanbag animals." (pp. 243-4)

SAT Vocabulary Words

Pluck: spirited and determined courage.
"anyone with pluck and a willingness to take some risks to close a sale" (p. 18)

Concern: a business; a firm.
"a fast-growing stuffed-animal concern" (p. 20)

Vagary: an unexpected and inexplicable change in a situation or in someone's behavior.
"Warner was too 'narrowly concentrated' for the vagaries of corporate life" (p. 25)

Brassy: (typically of a woman) tastelessly showy or loud in appearance or manner.
"his neighbor, Patria Roche, a bold, brassy lady who looks and acts like Liza Minnelli" (p. 28)

Cachet: the state of being respected or admired; prestige.
"gave Ty Inc. the cachet of being associated with 'designers,' thereby making the company seema  little more high-end than other lines where a bear was just a bear" (p. 37)

Avaricious: having or showing an extreme greed for wealth or material gain.
" 'How to Double Your Money in Collector's Plates: Guaranteed Return with No Risk....' Lest the appeal seem avaricious, readers were also assured that they could 'own and enjoy the beauty of true works of art.' " (p. 70)

Ethos: the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations.
"moms are part of an ethos 'that encourages consumerism as the solution to the work/life struggle' " (p. 75)

Maven: an expert or connoisseur.
"first as a Beanie collector, then as a Beanie maven" (p. 75)

Gibe: an insulting or mocking remark; a taunt.
"At the Toy Fair in February 1996, a stranger approached Warner and offered him $2 million for the Beanie Baby line. Warner replied that he'd consider $100 million - which at the time was just a gibe. But it would soon represent less than one month's sales." (p. 78)

Dour: relentlessly severe, stern, or gloomy in manner or appearance.
"Steiff had grown up in a well-to-do but dour and toy-less family and later recalled her gratitude at being allowed once to play with a pile of lentils, which she poured between cups." (p. 79)

Impresario: relentlessly severe, stern, or gloomy in manner or appearance.
"a collectibles impresario and the publisher of Rosie's Collectors' Bulletin" (p. 93)

Injunction: a judicial order that restrains a person from beginning or continuing an action threatening or invading the legal right of another, or that compels a person to carry out a certain act, e.g., to make restitution to an injured party.
"won an injunction... Warner capitulated and paid him $150,000" (p. 111)

Hawk: carry around and offer (goods) for sale, typically advertising them by shouting.
"hawked a $2,000 collection of ninety-four Beanie babies by explaining that many of the pieces in the collection would be retired soon" (p. 114)

Uncouth: (especially of art or language) lacking sophistication or delicacy.
"How very uncouth that they would put [money] ahead of customers in this respect"

Excoriate: censure or criticize severely.
"A parent wrote in to excoriate the very idea of adult Beanie collectors: 'You should be encouraging people to let the children have their toys and find their own items to collect.' "( p. 139)

Cloy: disgust or sicken (someone) with an excess of sweetness, richness, or sentiment.
"cloying tales of the impact Beanies had on people's lives" (p. 140)

Acolyte: a person assisting the celebrant in a religious service or procession.
"Few of the craze's acolytes acknowledge its insanity even in hindsight." (p. 197)

Halcyon: denoting a period of time in the past that was idyllically happy and peaceful.
"retailers Ty would never have imagined selling to in the halcyon days" (p. 201)

Jilted: suddenly reject or abandon (a lover).
"jilted lovers" (p. 209)

Arraign: call or bring (someone) before a court to answer a criminal charge.
"plead guilty at his arraignment" (p. 213)

Read More

The Richest Woman in America (Hetty Green in the Gilded Age)

Here's the vocabulary list for The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age by Janet Wallach.

ISBN 978-0-385-53197-9
Wallach, Janet. The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age. Crown, 2013.

Representative Quotes

"New York was celebrating a financial boom. New institutions were opening on every corner, filling the canyons of Wall Street with retail banks, commercial banks, insurance companies, and brokerage firms. Investors in mining, real estate, and transportation were flush with funds. Eager to spend their new wealth, they were tearing down old buildings as fast as they could and putting up new ones so frequently that Harper's Magazine complained the city was unrecognizable for anyone born forty years before. Walt Whitman called it a 'rabid, feverish itching for change.'

Newly rich couples filled extravagant mansions with fabulous furnishings and installed bathrooms with hot and cold running water on every floor. Those who earned $10,000 a year and wanted a place in society were expected to have a big new house, a country place, a carriage, and a box at the opera, and, of course, to play host to lavish parties and balls." (p. 22-3)

"While Caroline thrived on New York's social whirl, Hetty sought escape from the city's commotion. While Caroline gushed with friends over the latest fashions, Hetty cocked an ear toward the men conversing on finance. While Caroline was intent on enhancing her position, Hetty was focused on expanding her fortune. The debutantes' world held little attraction for her: she may have enjoyed dancing, and she may have indulged in gossip, but she had no taste for frothy teas, no craving for fussy clothes, no liking for luxuries that money could buy. Hetty hungered for money itself." (p. 30)

"When [Hetty's father] asked her why she still had money in her New York bank account, she told him that with the $1,200 he had given her, she had bought $200 worth of clothes. The rest, she proudly announced, she had invested in bonds that had already grown in value. 'That investment turned out so well that I soon made others,' she told an acquaintance." (p. 31)

"Entrepreneurs willing to build the rail lines prodded the federal government to grant them land along which they could lay the tracks. But even though the land was free, they needed money for payrolls and equipment. Smart investors and shrewd speculators could see the future whizzing before them. Tempted by the possibility of huge returns from railroads and from the development of the land surrounding them into towns, mining centers, and manufacturing hubs, they poured money into New York banks. A flood of new funds arrived from Boston and New Bedford, from Chicago and St. Louis, and from London, Paris, and Frankfurt. Awash in capital, the banks loaned money at easy interest rates to railroad promoters, mining prospectors, land speculators, merchants, and farmers." (p. 33)

"Everyone wanted a piece of the prosperity pie. Eager clients could almost taste their earnings as they bought shares of everything from the Crystal Palace, even as its stock was plummeting from 175 to 53, to the Reading Railroad to Pacific mining ventures. 'You can't lose,' stock salesmen promised naive clients. Trading in railroad stocks zoomed. Canny manipulators devised new instruments that enabled them to purchase more shares with less cash....

That same month Eerie Railroad stocks started sliding. Soon after, investors were agog when the New Haven Railroad announced that its president, Robert Schuyler, a prominent member of New York society, had swindled the company of $2 million. More railroads slipped as confidence fell, and for a few months Wall Street, trading primarily in railroad stocks, ran gloomily off the track. But if speculators who had bought on margin were forced to sell their shares to cover their losses, shrewd investors like Commodore Vanderbilt and speculators like Jay Gould swooped up the stocks at low prices. Hetty Robinson would later do the same.

Railroads were falling, but a feverish rush for gold sent mining stocks soaring. Midwestern banks opened branches in New York so that customers could redeem their notes in the East. Five new bank buildings, commended for their graceful architecture, were under construction on Wall Street, and the total number of banks in the city was on its way to doubling. It seemed as though everyone was becoming rich.

For three years the boom continued. Banks encouraged spending and loaned generously at low interest. When customers reached their credit limit, instead of cutting off further loans, the bankers urged them to borrow more, and then sold the loans at discounted prices to other institutions. With easy money, merchants and manufacturers expanded their businesses. Consumers shopped at a furious pace, importing fancy French furnishings for their oversized mansions....

The country was drunk on prosperity." (p. 35)

"And then the bubble burst. Toward the end of 1857, the news from the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company leaked the first bits of air. Unbeknownst to its Midwestern directors, the manager of its New York branch had embezzled millions of dollars. In addition, the bank had borrowed funds from other New York institutions in order to lend money to railroad builders and speculators in railroad stocks. But European demand for American grain had waned with the end of the Crimean War, and with bumper crops around the world, Midwestern farmers received lower prices and shipped fewer foodstuffs by railroad.

"The overextended railroads had borrowed millions of dollars from Ohio Life and could not pay them back. When the insurance company revealed its $2 million loss from the embezzlement plus $5 million in losses on loans to railroad builders, stocks speculators, and in its own trading accounts, the New York banks demanded the money owed them. In response, Ohio Life declared bankruptcy at its New York office and shut its doors.

"Events spiraled downward.

"Midwestern banks were forced to borrow more money from New York. The farmers who withdrew their money from their accounts every summer to cover seasonal costs could not replace it in the fall; nor could they repay the merchants who had extended them credit. N.H. Wolfe, the oldest flour and grain company in New York, declared bankruptcy. The president of a Michigan railroad announced his resignation. Railroad stocks slid to half their prices of four years earlier.

"Big bankers, worried that other clients were overextended, nervously called their customers for immediate repayment of matured loans. But Ohio Life was not the only one that had borrowed far beyond its means. Within weeks other banks and major Wall Street investors, ruined by bad loans, suspended operations or defaulted. Rumors raced through the city, growing more exaggerated at every telling. Crowds huddled in the canyons of Wall Street as panicked creditors, worried that their banks would not be able to pay them, withdrew their money. Although each bank issued its own version of paper money backed by gold, in reality the paper notes were not at par value with the metal. The public demanded the gold. With imports high and confidence low, the banks were forced to make their payments in gold, but their stores of specie, as metal coins were called, were shrinking.

"Dark clouds hovered. 'People look dubious and whisper darkly,' one man wrote, noting that several stock operators suffered serious failures. A few clever men like Russell Sage, a future role model for Hetty, kept substantial amounts of cash on hand and used it to buy stocks at rock-bottom prices. John Pierpont Morgan told his son there was a good lesson to be learned from other people's greed and good bargains to be found in the aftermath. In future times, Hetty would always keep cash available and use it to buy when everyone else was selling. Much later, Warren Buffett would do the same. But most people watched their money wash away in the flood; it felt like the crash and depression that had taken place twenty years before." (pp. 39-40)

" 'Extra! Extra!' 'War has begun!' newsboys shouted on April 12. Looming over New York was the threat that the South would lower its import duties to half the northern tariffs, ship cotton to Europe, and open its harbors to household goods and war materiel. What would happen if southern cotton no longer flowed to New York? If southern loans were no longer paid to the city's banks? If southern orders for goods were no longer sent to New York?

"With visions of ships rotting in the East River and grass growing in the streets, New York businessmen were roused from their neutral slumber. They could no longer afford to rest while another financial panic hit the city. Instead, they rallied to keep the Union intact." (p. 51)

"The rules of the marketplace state that for every seller there must be a buyer. The more the public discounted paper money, pushing it down as low as fifty cents on the dollar, the more Hetty bought. This was the start of the contrary investing she followed for the rest of her life: buying when everyone else was selling; selling when everyone else was buying. 'I buy when things are low and nobody wants them. I keep them until they go up and people are crazy to get them. That is, I believe, the secret of all successful business,' she said.

"Her philosophy reverberates today in the transactions of Warren Buffett. After a tumultuous period in the stock market, he told his shareholders in 2010: 'We've put a lot of money to work during the chaos of the last two years. It's been an ideal period for investors: a climate of fear is their best friend.' " (p. 71)

"The U.S. government provided vast amounts of tax-free land around the tracks in the West and gave rights to the minerals in the ground; but in order to finance the projects, the railroad builders borrowed money, using the land as collateral. American bankers eagerly loaned them the money for construction, and then, to soften their own risk and increase their profits, they issued bonds. Seeking money for the bonds in London, Paris, and Frankfurt, they were welcomed with open arms. The Bank of England was paying interest rates of 3 to 6 percent, while the Americans were offering as much as 18 percent to lenders. Pleased to find such an attractive place for their funds, the Europeans quadrupled their investments to over $200 million in railroads and $1 billion in American stocks and bonds." (p. 78)

"Abigail Adams, who had bought 'State Notes' after the Revolutionary War when there was little confidence in the new government, found out the value of depreciated bonds. Against the objections of her husband, who put his money in land, Abigail used her pin money to buy the bonds, which increased far more in value than her husband's real estate. With Edward's knowledge of railroads and banking, with American industry booming, and with inflation soaring, Hetty increased her share of railroad stocks and U.S. Treasury bonds. The bonds would prove to be an outstanding investment." (p. 79)

"Opportunists in London were also buying greenbacks from local merchants: English businessmen were paid in paper money by American customers but could not exchange the greenbacks for a decent rate at the British banks. Promissory notes, cosigned by prestigious bankers, were being sold at discounts as high as 60 percent. Marcus Goldman, an immigrant from Germany, set up an office on Pine Street to buy and sell this commercial paper. Later he would team with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs, forming the company Goldman Sachs, to raise capital for American companies. When the American government agreed to pay par value for greenbacks, making the paper money almost equal to gold, arbitrageurs like Goldman and the Lazard Brothers, based in California and London, made a fortune." (pp. 79-80)

"New York was flush with money. The city was flooded with an endless stream of funds from Europe, ready credit from the banks for mortgages, 10 percent margin accounts on Wall Street, junk bonds and other newly devised railroad debentures, and other instruments for trading stocks, such as puts and calls - the option to sell (puts) or buy (calls) a stock at a specified price - used by the financier Russell Sage. The abundance of money had encouraged a 500 percent increase in railroad building since the end of the Civil War, gaining land grants for the builders but allowing tracks to be laid that sometimes went aimlessly from point to point. Along with the railroad boom came massive real estate speculation and a rash of consumer spending across the country.

" 'Everybody seemed to be making money,' said one writer, adding, 'nobody suspected he was living in a fool's paradise.' Even Chicago was quickly climbing back on its feet, with orders in place for steel and iron to erect buildings that would make it the most modern city in the country. In New York, where as fast as the stock market dropped, it bounced back, elegant patrons dined on oysters and champagne at Delmonico's new restaurant." (pp. 86-7)

"Central European banks and London financial institutions had money readily available for speculation in railroads and real estate. Developers in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna were furiously erecting elaborate public buildings and private homes in the beaux arts style, even using the promise of future houses as collateral on new mortgages.

"The rampant rush to buy more land at low interest rates sent property prices soaring. Yet even as the costs rose, real estate opportunists continued to borrow until they reached a point where buyers could not afford the land. The speculators were unable to pay back the interest on their loans. When the worthless mortgages caused a few European banks to collapse in the spring of 1873, the British institutions, wary of more shaky mortgages held by the rest of the banks, raised their lending rates. The bubble burst on the Continent.

"Moody's magazine observed a few years later: 'The world as a whole was money mad... All the great European cities seem to have had booms at this time. Vienna and Berlin were the most frenzied. The prices of sites went to purely fictitious figures, and the phenomenon was prevalent of the speculator who bought property, mostly on credit which he did not expect to use, with the expectation of forestalling the deferred payments by a sale at an advance.' The editors continued, 'At the same time, Europe was pouring the oil of its money on the flames of American speculation. Railways spanned the continent and gridironed the states.

" 'Suddenly something snapped, and the machinery stopped. A Vienna banking house broke under the weight of too heavy a load of Missouri, Kansas and Texas securities, followed by another carrying too much Canada Southern. The financial organism winced like a leviathan with a harpoon in his vitals.' As the spasms spread from stock exchanges to banks, and from banks to investors, from Istanbul to Stockholm and from Edinburgh to Alexandria, the world crouched in pain. The wounds had come from speculation, but, said Moody's, 'No war ever made more misery.' " (p. 88)

"The scarcity of funds triggered disaster: merchants defaulted because they could not find money to run their businesses; farmers went bankrupt because they could not borrow to plant their crops; railroads lost income because of the smaller shipments of food. The railroads were already suffering from the Eering Ring outrage with its worthless stock and corrupt activities in Washington; the Union Pacific scandal, which, like the Eerie, uncovered stolen profits and bribed politicians; and a general loss of confidence in railroad management....

"The Northern Pacific Railroad, which had been running at a loss and spending money to lay track faster than it was acquiring funds, announced on September 18, 1873, that it could no longer afford to pay bondholders the 8.5 percent dividend. The railroad folded in default. The highly reputable banking house of Jay Cooke & Company, which earlier had raised hundreds of millions of dollars in bond sales to finance the Civil War, had loaned money to the Northern Pacific. Now the railroad was unable to pay its debts to Jay Cooke, and the prominent firm was forced to close." (p. 89)

"The panic took its toll on almost everyone. It terrorized men who looked as though they had aged ten years in one day. Brokers, vigorous the day before, were walking with their backs bent from the blows of the market. Bankers, so confident yesterday, were leaning on canes, unsteady on their feet today....

"In every case financial crises followed a period of rampant and extravagant speculation." (pp. 90-1)

"At this time when stocks were being abandoned, Hetty wanted to trade.... 'When I see a good thing going for cheap because nobody wants it, I buy a lot of it and tuck it away.' For Hetty, the decline in the market offered an opportunity for the future.... She had a pile of cash when others were scouring for pennies, but she also had a deft mind and the colossal courage to push against the crowd.

"It was far easier to lose money than to make it.... Vanderbilt bought his stocks for cash and was able to wait out the market. But his followers, who risked their money on 10 percent margin, were racing to cover their losses. When a friend complained, he replied, 'If you had bought a hundred shares instead of a thousand, you could have held on. Never be in too great a hurry to get rich.' " (p. 94)

"While government officials and Congress argued over whether to allow deflation or encourage inflation, farmers and even small businessmen resorted to methods of barter. In 1874, a conservative Congress passed a bill to devalue the dollar by printing more money. The following year, after the economy failed to improve, Congress legislated to strengthen the system by backing U.S. dollars with gold. Those like Hetty, who had held on to their discounted greenbacks bought after the Civil War, were now flush with wealth." (p. 95)

"When her cleaning lady gave birth to a son, Hetty gave her a gold piece and told her to deposit it in the bank. Keep it there until he is twenty-one, she advised. Instead of understanding the lesson of compound interest, the woman scorned her for saving instead of spending.... 'Watch your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves.' " (p. 99)

"Mrs. E.H. Green... is believed to be the richest woman in America, a title earned by her own business sagacity, energy, and watchfulness.... She has lived a frugal life, exercised extraordinary keenness in her investments, and by embracing every good opportunity that the stock market afforded her, she has more than quintupled her heritage." (p. 116)

"I have observed that many a tattered garment hides a package of bonds and that gorgeous clothing does not always cover a millionaire." (p. 118)

"When she had read, quizzed, grilled, interrogated, and investigated enough, when she had studied the costs, analyzed the assets, and dug through the debts, when she had found the answers to suit her, when she knew the true worth of a company and understood its weaknesses, when she was satisfied that its basic values were sound and its assets strong, that the downside risk was low and the upside high, then she invested her money." (p. 121)

"She much preferred common people to the stuffy socialites of the upper class." (p. 121)

"If Mr. Astor did not appear at his wife's glittering balls, neither did many of his colleagues. While their wives and daughters, wearing Parisian gowns (and paying a 50 percent import tax for the privilege), descending from their brownstones and townhouses in the dark of night and, under the gaze of gossip columnists, partied with idle males till 2 a.m., the men who made the money supped early and went to sleep. Jay Gould, James Lenox, and William Vanderbilt, recoiling at the word 'cotillion,' retreated to their private clubs. Henry James understood: 'The highest luxury of all, the supremely expensive thing, is constituted privacy.' " (p. 123)

"When others were failing, Hetty often stepped in and saved them by buying their mortgages. The secret, of course, was available cash. She loved a bargain, and having money on hand to pick up distressed assets gave her a distinct advantage in the marketplace. Then, when the banks allowed foreclosure on her mortgages, Hetty assumed the property.

"Such was the case when she was sued for a mortgage she had purchased years before. In 1873, Hetty had loaned $150,000 for a mortgage, and after three years of nonpayment the bank foreclosed; she bought the property at a bargain price. By 1890 its value had grown to $1 million." (p. 140)

"You should never marry a society man with my consent. I want to see you happily married and in a home of your own, but I want you to marry a poor young man of good principles who is making an honest hard fight for success. I don't care whether he's got $100 or not, provided he is made of the right stuff. You will have more money than you'll ever need and it isn't necessary to look for a young man with money. Now you know my wish and I hope I won't hear anything more about your young man in Newport who knows just about enough to part his hair in the middle and spend his father's money." (p. 147)

"The rich needed to spend their money in order to improve their social position; the newer their money, the more they spent. They were spreading their dollars abroad, buying more clothes, more jewels, more furnishings, more food, and more wines from Europe, creating a demand for more payments in gold from American banks." (pp. 155-6)

"Companies whose stocks had skyrocketed, whose dividends defied gravity, collapsed when their lack of capital was revealed. Money became so tight that short-term interest rates soared as high as 75 percent. The National Cordage Company, one of the most heavily traded stocks on the exchange, could not get credit and declared insolvency. The market plunged. Investors panicked. The Gilded Age, like other eras of avarice, opulence, and easy credit, burst from gluttony." (p. 156)

"Perceptions of Hetty were as varied as those of the Wizard of Oz.... 'I've been reading of Hetty Green. I think she must be crazy....' 'Why, she's worth 40 millions....' 'Then she can't be crazy. She's only eccentric.' " (p. 165)

"The case against the trustees of Edward Robinson's estate was first brought about by the sale of property in Cicero, near Chicago, in 1888. The executors had insisted on selling the vacant land for $650,000 although they had been offered $800,000 for the same acreage. The sale roused Hetty's suspicions: she accused the men of investing her father's money with their own interests in mind. Fees they charged for managing the trust seemed excessive and included payments to their own relatives. Money they paid to public officials 'for improving the morals of the city' went toward procuring improvements on the trustees' property. Improvements they made had no effect on her land but clearly enhanced their own. Claims were made for repairs but no vouchers were produced. And no accounting of the trust had been made in more than a decade. When Hetty asked to see the papers, they balked at bringing them forth." (p. 166)

"Instead of giving her money away lavishly like Annie Leary, she handed it out meagerly, providing jobs, not welfare, avoiding the publicity that led to more requests.... 'Hetty Green has in secret done a vast deal more of philanthropy than the public can give her credit for.' " (p. 170)

"To live content with small means; To seek elegance rather than luxury, And refinement rather than fashion; To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich." (p. 176)

"With money readily available, investors and manipulators borrowed from the banks to buy stocks. The rash of buying sent prices zooming: men whispered hot tips in one another's ears; rumors roiled of companies going sour; stories spread of huge amounts of money being made overnight. Hetty watched from the sidelines as America swirled in another carnival of speculation; rich and poor rushed to the carousel and reached for the brass ring. Corporate leaders and clerks bought and sold on margin; many bought shares being offered to bankroll the purchases of worthless firms. The irresponsible borrowing echoed the past: 'I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars,' mocked Mark Twain in The Gilded Age. The reckless use of margin and the razzle-dazzle of new industrial stocks also predicted the future, foreshadowing the dot-com bubble and the frenzy for initial public offerings at the turn of the twenty-first century.

"Everyone but Hetty seemed to be buying. She did not buy industrials, she said, and never bought with borrowed money.... Her approach was far more cautious: 'When good things are so low that no one wants them, I buy them and lay them away in a safe; when owing to some new development, they go up and my shares are so needed that men will pay well for them, I am ready to sell.'

"She watched for bargains but never bought to be in style... In the frantic heat of the market Hetty kept a cool head. She attributed her success to her basic rule: 'always buying when everyone wants to sell, and selling when everyone wants to buy. As easy as her motto appeared, it took restraint to keep from buying while others swooped up stocks in the euphoria of a boom; it took courage to remain calm while the crowd dumped their shares overboard in a wave of panic." (p. 191-2)

"She believed that a knowledge of business would make a woman a better wife. In the past, said Hetty, at the end of the day the only thing a woman could do to relieve her husband's strain was 'to make herself as pretty as a wax doll. But there is no reason why that primitive idea... should continue to exist in the sense it once did.' A woman who understood the pressures on her husband would be a far more sympathetic spouse.

"In spite of her strong words, she had little support for women's suffrage and no desire to see a woman president. 'I should hope not,' she said piercing the interviewer with her steely eyes. 'I don't believe in so-called women's rights. I am willing to leave politics to the men.' Indeed, she had never taken office at any corporate board, nor had she been the public face of any company; she left it to her husband and son to hold those positions. Nonetheless, she wished women had more rights in the world of commerce. 'I could have succeeded much easier had I been a man. I find men will take advantage of women in business that they would not attempt with men.' " (pp. 195-6)

"As the boom continued, more and more Americans were eager to take part, borrowing money from the banks to buy stocks at prices that soared like out-of-control hot-air balloons.

"At the same time, the cost of land skyrocketed around the country, as people raced to buy up real estate in cities, towns, and rural communities. Inevitably, the cost of borrowing the money to buy the land rose precipitously. While others bought, Hetty sold. 'I saw the handwriting on the wall,' she said later. 'Every real estate deal which I could possibly close up was converted into cash.'

"In 1905 the call for money surpassed anything that had come before. The heavy requests pushed interest rates up, causing many people to owe the banks far more than they had....

"Black clouds hung over the debtors; many had little choice but to divest their holdings. Hetty watched as rich men arrived at the Chemical; doffing their top hats, drawing out their expensive engraved cards, and handing them to the clerk at the door, they sought her out to sell off their possessions. As rates rose, more and more of 'the solidest men in Wall Street... financials to legitimate businessmen,' came to call, begging to unload everything from palatial mansions to automobiles." (p. 199)

"When it comes to spending your life, there have to be some things neglected. If you try to do too much, you can never get anywhere. As I was naturally made for work, I just as naturally wasn't made for a fashion plate. I have never bothered about what to wear.... I like to see what other people are wearing. It does me good sometimes and gives me a laugh." (p. 221)

"She had enough of courage to live as she chose and to be as thrifty as she pleased, and she observed such of the world's conventions as seemed to her right and useful, coldly and calmly ignoring all the others." (p. 227)

SAT Vocabulary Words

Brocade: a rich fabric, usually silk, woven with a raised pattern, typically with gold or silver thread.
"buying brocades from Frace" (p. 7)

Mainstay: a thing on which something else is based or depends.
"The Howland and Robinson families were a mainstay of whaling and banking" (p. 8)

Sagacious: having or showing keen mental discernment and good judgment; shrewd.
"sagacious businessman" (p. 8)

Rectitude: morally correct behavior or thinking; righteousness.
"He trusted his brothers in commerce and knew he could rely on them for honesty and goodwill, candor and rectitude." (p. 8)

Vestibule: an antechamber, hall, or lobby next to the outer door of a building.
"advancing no farther than the vestibule" (p. 26)

Frock: a loose outer garment, in particular.
"frock coats" (p. 28)

Watchword: a word or phrase expressing a person's or group's core aim or belief.
"Waste was wicked; frugality was his watchword." (p. 30)

Duds: clothes.
"Take your duds and leave." (p. 55)

Fete: a celebration or festival.
"Ordinary fetes were forgotten as Hetty watched her once-vigorous father waste away." (p. 64)

Conundrum: a question asked for amusement, typically one with a pun in its answer; a riddle.
"conundrums, charades, or chess" (p. 75)

Sultan: a Muslim sovereign.
"sultan of Turkey" (p. 75)

Dapper: (typically of a man) neat and trim in dress, appearance, or bearing.
"dapper entrepreneurs who all hoped for blessings" (p. 77)

Sojourn: a temporary stay.
"sojourned in the country and at the seaside" (p. 83)

Scurrilous: making or spreading scandalous claims about someone with the intention of damaging their reputation.
"the scurrilous Gould and his band of thieves were forced of the Eerie board" (p. 87)

Avowed: that has been asserted, admitted, or stated publicly.
"he had borrowed more against company stock than had been avowed; furthermore, he had falsified the company's statements, claiming far less debt than the real amount" (p. 115)

Penurious: parsimonious; mean.
Parsimonious: unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal.
"a penurious man who seated his guests on rickety chairs and served them expensive wine poured into broken mugs" (p. 183)

Fortnight: a period of two weeks.
"for a fortnight he followed her to Hoboken" (p. 184)

Palatial: resembling a palace in being spacious and splendid.
"palatial mansions" (p. 199)

Scion: a descendant of a notable family.
"a scion of a real estate family" (p. 210)

Read More

Street Smarts (Jim Rogers)

Here's the vocabulary list for Street Smarts: Adventures On the Road and in the Markets by Jim Rogers.

ISBN 978-0-307-98607-8
Lewis, Michael. Street Smarts: Adventures On the Road and In the Markets. Crown, 2013.

Representative Quotes

"Work experience in one's youth offers quantifiable benefits. While teaching the value of money, it also helps you develop an identity; in learning to manage finances, you gain a tangible measure of autonomy.... A Columbia business school dean, citing a university study, told me that the single most important predictor of a happy life in adulthood was having a paying job as a teenager." (p. 9)

"[The senior partner at Dominick and Dominick] said, '[Business school] will teach you nothing useful there. Come down here and sell soybeans short, once, and you will learn much more about markets than you will wasting two years with them." (p. 12)

"The current bull market in commodities began in 1999. We are fourteen years into it, at the time of this writing. Like all bull markets, it will end in a bubble. When, at cocktail parties, people are telling you how much money they made in soybeans, it will be time to get out." (p. 28)

"The study of philosophy and history were indispensable to me as an investor. You must know yourself better if you want to accomplish anything in life - you must learn to think at a deeper, more profound level if you want to understand the truth.... Studying philosophy helped me to think for myself, to think outside the established framework. It taught me to examine things independently, to examine every concept and every 'fact.' It taught me to think around corners, to see what is missing. So many people today are caught up in conventional thinking because it is easier and safer to echo perceived wisdom, to echo the opinion of the majority, with one's intellectual processes circumscribed by such concepts as state, culture, or religion. To think differently from others is difficult. Philosophy teaches you to think, and in doing so it teaches you to doubt.

"If history teaches us nothing else, it teaches us this: what appears undisputed today will look very different tomorrow. The most stable and predictable societies have undergone major upheavals. The Austro-Hungarian empire, the glittering jewel of central Europe, was a vast, international center of wealth in 1914. The Vienna stock exchange at the time had something like four thousand members. Within four years the Austro-Hungarian empire disappeared. Pick any year you want, and then move forward ten or fifteen years. Take 1925, when again widespread peace, prosperity, and stability prevailed. How did things look in 1935? In 1940? Pick the first year of any decade in the past fifty years, 1960, 1970, all the way through to the millennium. The conventional wisdom that existed at the start of each decade was shattered over the following ten or fifteen years." (pp. 29-30)

"The beauty, the excitement of Wall Street, is that things are always changing.... Every day you come to work and find that they have moved the pieces on you - somebody dies, there is a strike or a war, weather conditions have shifted. Things change, no matter what. Investing lacks the rhythm of other endeavors, and therefore never stops testing you: if you design a car, there is a predictable period of time in which you produce the car and sell it, and the market will either accept it or reject it, but at least the project has a life span. With investing, nothing stops moving, and that makes it a continual, ongoing challenge... a game, a battle." (p. 35)

"To succeed on Wall Street, you have to be extremely curious. Who knows, when you pick up a rock, what might crawl out and where it will lead? Furthermore, you have to be skeptical. Most of the things you are told, after turning over that rock, are going to be inaccurate, reflecting a lack of knowledge or a distortion of information, whether on the part of a government, a company, or an individual. You cannot take anybody's word for anything. You have to research everything yourself, prove everything yourself. You have to tap every source. A hundred people can walk into a room and hear the same information at the same time, but only 3 or 4 percent of them are going to come out of there and make the right judgment." (pp. 36-37)

"When I started on Wall Street, very few people invested in stocks. As late as the 1960's, individual and institutional investors, such as pension plans and endowments, invested chiefly in bonds. (Currencies and commodities? Few people on Wall Street could even spell those words.)... It is inconceivable to today's MBAs that common stocks were an uncommon investment only a few decades ago. But not until the bull market started in the 1980s did things change in a big way." (p. 37)

"I remember getting out of the army in 1968, talking about investing in things like the Danish krone, and the people around me not having a clue as to what I was going on about. All those smart, experienced older guys were just dumbfounded. It seemed as though they did not know where Denmark was, much less that it presented an opportunity." (p. 39)

"Before asking how much you are going to get paid for a job, first decide whether it is the right job, whether it is the right place for you, because if it is the right place and you do the job right, the money will come.... The money should be the least of your questions." (p. 42)

"I went to see the chairman of Helmerich & Payne.... He said, 'Listen, this is a terrible business. I just want to alert you. I am here, this is my family company, and obviously I am not going to leave, but you really should not be investing in this business....' He had explained the downturn in business as something beyond the company's control - there had been a long decline in the number of drilling rigs because drilling for gas or oil had not been profitable. And that just excited me more. Everywhere I went I could see that supplies were drying up. We went out and invested in all of it." (p. 45)

"Do not worry about failure. Do not worry about making mistakes in life. It is good to lose money, to go broke at least once, and preferably twice. But if you are going to do it, do it early in your career. It is better to go bust when you are talking about $20,000 than when you are talking about $20 million. Do it early, and it is not the end of the world.

"Losing everything can be a beneficial experience, because it teaches you how much you do not know. And if you can come back from a failure or two, chances are that you care going to be more successful in the long run." (p. 55)

"After ten years you have made ten times your money. And then you decide to sell. Now, that is a very dangerous time. It is dangerous because that is when you think you are really smart, when you think you are really hot. It is the time when you think you know that this investing thing is an easy game. It is the time you should open your curtains, look out the window, go to the beach, do anything but think about investing. Because now is when you are most vulnerable. You think: I have to find something else. I have to do it again. This is wonderful. This is so easy....

"Most successful investors do nothing most of the time. Do not confuse movement with action. Know when to sit and wait.... Warren Buffett rarely changes his holdings. I do not change my positions a lot since I invest in secular trends, which by definition last many years." (pp. 58-9)

"Why get up at 8:00 A.M. to drag yourself to Spanish class three days a week when you can learn more efficiently and on your own schedule via computer? Does America need thirty thousand expensive, tenured Spanish professors? Is the Spanish professor at Princeton going to teach you Spanish better than anybody else? You can learn Spanish a lot faster, probably better, and certainly for a lot less money, by going online. Likewise with accounting, physics, and calculus." (p. 79)

"The black market is indispensable to one's insight into a country. Right away you know if there is a black market, and if so, whether the currency carries a big premium..... You do not know what is wrong if there is a black market, but it gives you the first hint. And if there is a big premium in the market - a large discrepancy between the official rate and the black market rate - you know something is seriously wrong." (p. 88)

"Today America is borrowing money to pay for military hardware that sits and rusts in the sun. The man who manufactures the hardware makes money, but after that, there is no beneficiary. The investment does not represent an ongoing source of production, the way a canal or a railroad does. Today we spent our borrowed money on transfer payments (over 60 percent of government spending and more than all government revenue), and then people who get the payments certainly have a wonderful time, but such payments do nothing for future productivity. If, as a nation, you are just consuming, instead of investing and saving, the borrowed money does you little good.

"What is worse, the people we have entrusted with the responsibility for addressing the problem - too much consumption, too much debt - have decided that the solution lies in yet more consumption and more debt." (p. 118)

"I was short Citibank, all the investment banks, the homebuilders, and Fannie Mae [in 2008]. The incompetence in Washington and on Wall Street was in fact good to people like me. While countless Americans were watching their life savings evaporate, the skeptical investor enjoyed significant gains." (p. 119)

"In the early 1990s, Japan experienced a big bubble in real estate and stocks. When I was traveling through the country by motorcycle on my first trip around the world, the price of a country club membership in Japan exceeded the price of a house. It was awe inspiring what people in Japan were willing to pay to play golf. The bubble was just peaking. The bubble eventually popped, and everything collapsed.... When I passed through Japan on my second trip around the world, ten years later, its suicide rate was higher than that of any developed country. Everyone was despondent, looking for security. Government jobs were highly sought after. The Japanese were referring to the 1990s as 'the lost decade.'

"And now the lost decade has become two. Today, more than twenty years after the crash, the Japanese stock market is 75 percent below where it was in 1990." (p. 132)

"People get greedy... bankers, clergymen, academics, politicians... especially when times are exceptionally good. People cut corners, do things they might not do under normal conditions, because there is so much prosperity, they are not held to account. Stocks go up. Investments pay off. The corners that are cut actually make people a lot of money. No one questions, or even cares, what happened - they are so happy with all the money they have made.

"Manias cover over a multitude of sins.

" 'You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out,' says Warren Buffett." (pp. 136-7)

"The spark igniting the activity is not necessarily political so much as it is economic: surging inflation, high unemployment, and an escalating cost of living, most significantly a rise in food prices. These are the things that make people deeply angry. (The Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing in the spring of 1989 started out as protests against inflation and rising prices. Not until the Western press showed up did students start shouting words like "democracy.") (p. 209)

" 'Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another,' said Abraham Lincoln, 'but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built." (p. 211)

"North Korea is about to open up. And when it does, it will be a formidable player on the world stage. The Chinese are already pouring in. Up in the northwest, they are building new bridges connecting the two countries. There are new trade zones up there. So change is happening.

"Everywhere we went we could see propaganda posers calling for one country, two systems - which was the prevailing mantra in the late 1990s when Hong Kong went back to China. If the propaganda is to be believed, the country, despite what you read in the United States, is keen for unification. A unified Korea would be an economic powerhouse." (pp. 228-9)

"The successful countries of the world do not tax savings and investment. They encourage their citizens to save and invest. They tax consumption. In America we do the opposite; we encourage consumption. Any interest we pay is tax-deductible....

"The tax system has grown so byzantine that Americans, according to the IRS, spend an estimated 6.6 billion hours a year filling out tax forms. The annual cost of compliance to individuals, corporations, and nonprofits... is between three and four hundred billion dollars....

"Change the tax system, change the education system, institute health-care and litigation reform, and bring the troops home... is that going to happen? The way the world has evolved, most governments, including our own, are dominated and controlled by special interests. And numerous interests, including their lobbyists, have become entrenched around the system already in place. None of these changes can happen the way the government works today.

"In 1789 when the government was established, there were no telephones, the mail was slow, and videoconferencing was unimaginable. So we set up government in one place, Washington, where our representatives could meet. If we were setting up government in 2015, we would probably do it over the Internet. There is no reason for everyone to travel to Washington, especially given what has evolved since the nation was founded, which is a gigantic bureaucracy surrounded and controlled by lobbyists." (pp. 240-1)

SAT Vocabulary Words

Coxswain: the steersman of a ship's boat, lifeboat, racing boat, or other boat.

"competed as a coxswain on the crew" (p. 9)

Picaresque: relating to an episodic style of fiction dealing with the adventures of a rough and dishonest but appealing hero.

"As a boy I had loved reading Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, and the gentlemen of the Pickwick Club and their picaresque adventures may have played some part in the development of my wanderlust." (p. 10)

Scion: a descendant of a notable family.

Venerable: accorded a great deal of respect, especially because of age, wisdom, or character.

"Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange, scion of the venerable family for which the Whitney Museum is named" (p. 137)

Caliphate: the rule or reign of a caliph or chief Muslim ruler.

"an Islamic caliphate that flourished for a hundred years" (p. 171)

Habeas corpus: a writ requiring a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court, especially to secure the person's release unless lawful grounds are shown for their detention.

"What has changed is not that the government has overstepped its authority - Abraham Lincoln went so far as to suspend habeas corpus - but that the government's doing so has become acceptable, celebrated in some cases." (p. 176)

Dopey: idiotic.

"in walks this dopey little guy wanting to open up a Swiss account with the equivalent of pocket change" (p. 193)

Imam: the person who leads prayers in a mosque.

"People who have tried to outmaneuver the marketplace have never succeeded. No pope, no imam, has the power the negate the laws of supply and demand." (p. 206)

Read More