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  A well-planned word wall allows students to quickly access familiar high frequency words from word study instruction. As they are writing, they can simply glance up, find the word, and continue to write. With… Continue reading →

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If you're looking for a game that students will beg to play every week, this is it. I've used it in classrooms and academic enrichment programs at summer camp with fantastic results. Add this to Bug and The Mysterious Box of Mystery, and you have three solid sure-fire games for your ELA toolbox.

Big Words is an activity which promotes an increase in phonetic awareness, spelling accuracy, and vocabulary development. The game I describe below was inspired by authors Patricia M. Cunningham and Dorothy P. Hall in their book Making Big Words. The copy I purchased over ten years ago encouraged me to turn their ideas into a class-wide game which has been a huge hit ever since.

The first objective of the game is to create as many words as possible from a given set of letters. To play, each student is given an envelope containing a strip of letters in alphabetical order, vowels listed first and then consonants. The student cuts these apart so that the individual letters can be easily manipulated on the desktop. Moving the letters about, students attempt to form as many words as possible. Beginners may only be able to form two-, three-, and four-letter words, but with time and practice will be able to use knowledge of word parts and blends to form much longer words.

The second objective is to spell a single word (the Big Word!) with all the letters. In my class, that Big Word very often relates to an upcoming trip, project, or special event, and thus serves double-duty to build excitement and enthusiasm.

As Big Words is used on a regular basis, the teacher can discuss strategies for increasing word counts. Some of these strategies include rhyming, changing single letters at the beginning or ending of each word, using blends, homophones, etc. Many additional words can also be generated through the use of -s to create plurals, and -e to create long vowel sounds. Some students will discover that reading their words backwards prompts additional ideas. Additionally, the teacher can discuss word parts which can help students to understand what they read (such as how the suffix -tion usually changes a verb to a noun, as in the word relaxation).

While the book emphasizes individual practice, we prefer to play Big Words as a class game. I've outlined our procedures below. You can also access these directions as a printable Google Doc.

BIG WORDS Game Play

1. Have students cut apart the letters, and then begin forming as many words as possible using those letters. Remind them to not share ideas with partners, and to not call out words as they work (especially the Big Word). 
2. After about fifteen minutes, have students draw a line under their last word, and then number their list. They cannot add to or change their lists, but new words that they hear from classmates should be added once the game starts.
3. Divide the class into two teams. Direct students to use their pencil to “star” their four best words which they would like to share. These should be words which the other team might not have discovered.
4. Determine how the score will be kept (on a chalkboard, interactive whiteboard, etc.). The teacher should also have a way to publicly write words as they're shared so that students can copy them more easily.  Here are links to a PowerPoint scoreboard or an online scoreboard.
5. Hand a stuffed animal or other object to the first student from each team. This tangible item will help the students, and you, to know whose turn it is to share. Tell students that only the player holding the stuffed animal may speak. Other players who talk out of turn will cost their team one penalty point. These penalty points should be awarded to the opposing team, not subtracted from a score. This will greatly reduce unnecessary noise. 
6. Play takes place as follows: The first student shares a word, nice and loud. He or she spells it out. If any player on the opposing team has that word, they raise their hand quietly and the teacher checks to see that it is the same word. (It doesn't matter if any student on the speaker's team has the word or not). Every player who has it should check it off, and every player who does not have it should write it into their notebook. 
7. If no player on the opposing team has the word, then the team scores 3 points. If anyone on the opposing team has the word, then only 1 point is scored. 
8. If a player shares a word which has already been given aloud, their team is penalized 2 points! This helps everyone to pay better attention to the game. 
9. Ironically, the Big Word counts for as many points as any other word. Feel free to change that if you prefer, but I discovered that if I make it worth more points, students waste an extraordinary amount of time trying to form the Big Word alone, while ignoring the creation of any smaller words. 
10. Play until a predetermined time, and then if the Big Word hasn't been formed yet, provide students with the first two or three letters to see who can create it.

Enjoy the game! I know your students will.

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Games are the most elevated form of investigation.  ~ Albert Einstein

I just finished reading Cathy N. Davidson's wonderful Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn. I'll need to reread it, to be honest, because too often my mind began drifting to my own classroom as I read. I began asking myself if I was doing all that I could to engage students, and the answer was a sad and resounding no. My classes are severely lacking in game play.

According to Davidson, "Games have long been used to train concentration, to improve strategy, to learn human nature, and to understand how to think interactively and situationally." In the classroom, games capture and focus attention, increase motivation, and allow for complete, overt engagement.

My most often downloaded resource, in fact, is a Theme Game I created on Google Slides. At least one of my readers a day downloads this activity, which means that other teachers are seeing the value of game play in the classroom.

I readily admitted to my students that I created Bug, and it would have some, well, "bugs" that needed to be worked out. But students were eager to help in this regard, and our finished game is best described through the Google Slides presentation below.


What We Learned Together

1) We decided that certain modifications were allowed (simple switch, blend mend, one letter better) since they were sophisticated and advanced the game, while others were not allowed (adding a simple s to create a plural, adding both a vowel and a consonant together, reconstructing a word that has already been spelled). Students likewise dismissed the possibility of allowing prefixes and suffixes, deciding that those modifications didn't truly change the words enough.

2) We learned that four to five minutes was a suitable time for each round of play. Once each round finished, players could challenge their current partner if the match ended in a tie, or winners could challenge other winners and losers could challenge other losers, or, simply, anyone else could challenge any other classmate. Students didn't care whom they played; students simply wanted to play! My period one class of only eight students played using a traditional bracket to decide a final winner, but other classes were content to engage in free range play.

3) Students did begin to employ strategies. One clever student used "shrug" as her first word each time, instantly earning a power up and leaving her partner with a difficult word to manage. When her second partner countered with "shrub," this student needed to quickly adapt and used her earned power down to create "scrum." Scrum? Yes, this game encourages vocabulary development as well.

4) By game's end we concluded that, catchy name aside, every new game couldn't begin with "bug." Too many students were trying to play the same words each round, and too many rounds fell into the same predictable list of words. We decided that each new game should start with a different three letter word.

5) We played our games with large (12 x 18) paper and colored markers, but for a future game we're likely to play with standard sized paper and colored pencils. Students liked the visual separation that two colors provided, but the size format probably won't be needed in the future.

We would love to hear your recommendations, variations, and success stories!

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Games are the most elevated form of investigation.  ~ Albert Einstein

I just finished reading Cathy N. Davidson's wonderful Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn. I'll need to reread it, to be honest, because too often my mind began drifting to my own classroom as I read. I began asking myself if I was doing all that I could to engage students, and the answer was a sad and resounding no. My classes are severely lacking in game play.

According to Davidson, "Games have long been used to train concentration, to improve strategy, to learn human nature, and to understand how to think interactively and situationally." In the classroom, games capture and focus attention, increase motivation, and allow for complete, overt engagement.

My most often downloaded resource, in fact, is a Theme Game I created on Google Slides. At least one of my readers a day downloads this activity, which means that other teachers are seeing the value of game play in the classroom.

I readily admitted to my students that I created Bug, and it would have some, well, "bugs" that needed to be worked out. But students were eager to help in this regard, and our finished game is best described through the Google Slides presentation below.


What We Learned Together

1) We decided that certain modifications were allowed (simple switch, blend mend, one letter better) since they were sophisticated and advanced the game, while others were not allowed (adding a simple s to create a plural, adding both a vowel and a consonant together, reconstructing a word that has already been spelled). Students likewise dismissed the possibility of allowing prefixes and suffixes, deciding that those modifications didn't truly change the words enough.

2) We learned that four to five minutes was a suitable time for each round of play. Once each round finished, players could challenge their current partner if the match ended in a tie, or winners could challenge other winners and losers could challenge other losers, or, simply, anyone else could challenge any other classmate. Students didn't care whom they played; students simply wanted to play! My period one class of only eight students played using a traditional bracket to decide a final winner, but other classes were content to engage in free range play.

3) Students did begin to employ strategies. One clever student used "shrug" as her first word each time, instantly earning a power up and leaving her partner with a difficult word to manage. When her second partner countered with "shrub," this student needed to quickly adapt and used her earned power down to create "scrum." Scrum? Yes, this game encourages vocabulary development as well.

4) By game's end we concluded that, catchy name aside, every new game couldn't begin with "bug." Too many students were trying to play the same words each round, and too many rounds fell into the same predictable list of words. We decided that each new game should start with a different three letter word.

5) We played our games with large (12 x 18) paper and colored markers, but for a future game we're likely to play with standard sized paper and colored pencils. Students liked the visual separation that two colors provided, but the size format probably won't be needed in the future.

We would love to hear your recommendations, variations, and success stories!

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A short and sweet reminder, from a student point-of-view.

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How can we encourage our youngest writers to use brave spelling? How can we help them overcome their fear of getting it wrong?

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One month is unlike another. Sometimes I receive many letters and many comments; then lean months may follow. February produced a good harvest (“February fill the dyke,” as they used to say), and I can glean a bagful. Perhaps I should choose a special title for my gleanings: “I Am All Ears” or something like it.

The post Monthly etymology gleanings for February 2015 appeared first on OUPblog.

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As always, I want to thank those who have commented on the posts and written me letters bypassing the “official channels” (though nothing can be more in- or unofficial than this blog; I distinguish between inofficial and unofficial, to the disapproval of the spellchecker and some editors). I only wish there were more comments and letters. With regard to my “bimonthly” gleanings, I did think of calling them bimestrial but decided that even with my propensity for hard words I could not afford such a monster. Trimestrial and quarterly are another matter. By the way, I would not call fortnightly a quaint Briticism. The noun fortnight is indeed unknown in the United States, but anyone who reads books by British authors will recognize it. It is sennight “seven nights; a week,” as opposed to “fourteen nights; two weeks,” that is truly dead, except to Walter Scott’s few remaining admirers.

The comments on livid were quite helpful, so that perhaps livid with rage does mean “white.” I was also delighted to see Stephen Goranson’s antedating of hully gully. Unfortunately, I do not know this word’s etymology and have little chance of ever discovering it, but I will risk repeating my tentative idea. Wherever the name of this game was coined, it seems to have been “Anglicized,” and in English reduplicating compounds of the Humpty Dumpty, humdrum, and helter-skelter type, those in which the first element begins with an h, the determining part is usually the second, while the first is added for the sake of rhyme. If this rule works for hully gully, the clue to the word’s origin is hidden in gully, with a possible reference to a dupe, a gull, a gullible person; hully is, figuratively speaking, an empty nut. A mere guess, to repeat once again Walter Skeat’s favorite phrase.

The future of spelling reform and realpolitik

Some time ago I promised to return to this theme, and now that the year (one more year!) is coming to an end, I would like to make good on my promise. There would have been no need to keep beating this moribund horse but for a rejoinder by Mr. Steve Bett to my modest proposal for simplifying English spelling. I am afraid that the reformers of our generation won’t be more successful than those who wrote pleading letters to journals in the thirties of the nineteenth century. Perhaps the Congress being planned by the Society will succeed in making powerful elites on both sides of the Atlantic interested in the sorry plight of English spellers. I wish it luck, and in the meantime will touch briefly on the discussion within the Society.

In the past, minimal reformers, Mr. Bett asserts, usually failed to implement the first step. The first step is not an issue as long as we agree that there should be one. Any improvement will be beneficial, for example, doing away with some useless double letters (till ~ until); regularizing doublets like speak ~ speech; abolishing c in scion, scene, scepter ~ scepter, and, less obviously, scent; substituting sk for sc in scathe, scavenger, and the like (by the way, in the United States, skeptic is the norm); accepting (akcepting?) the verbal suffix -ize for -ise and of -or for -our throughout — I can go on and on, but the question is not where to begin but whether we want a gradual or a one-fell-swoop reform. Although I am ready to begin anywhere, I am an advocate of painless medicine and don’t believe in the success of hav, liv, and giv, however silly the present norm may be (those words are too frequent to be tampered with), while til and unskathed will probably meet with little resistance.

I am familiar with several excellent proposals of what may be called phonetic spelling. No one, Mr. Bett assures me, advocates phonetic spelling. “What about phonemic spelling?” he asks. This is mere quibbling. Some dialectologists, especially in Norway, used an extremely elaborate transcription for rendering the pronunciation of their subjects. To read it is a torture. Of course, no one advocates such a system. Speakers deal with phonemes rather than “sounds.” But Mr. Bett writes bás Róman alfàbet shud rèmán ùnchánjd for “base Roman alphabet should remain unchanged.” I am all for alfabet (ph is a nuisance) and with some reservations for shud, but the rest is, in my opinion, untenable. It matters little whether this system is clever, convenient, or easy to remember. If we offer it to the public, we’ll be laughed out of court.

Mr. Bett indicates that publishers are reluctant to introduce changes and that lexicographers are not interested in becoming the standard bearers of the reform. He is right. That is why it is necessary to find a body (The Board of Education? Parliament? Congress?) that has the authority to impose changes. I have made this point many times and hope that the projected Congress will not come away empty-handed. We will fail without influential sponsors, but first of all, the Society needs an agenda, agree to the basic principles of a program, and for at least some time refrain from infighting.

The indefinite pronoun one once again

I was asked whether I am uncomfortable with phrases like to keep oneself to oneself. No, I am not, and I don’t object to the sentence one should mind one’s own business. A colleague of mine has observed that the French and the Germans, with their on and man are better off than those who grapple with one in English. No doubt about it. All this is especially irritating because the indefinite pronoun one seems to owe its existence to French on. However, on and man, can function only as the subject of the sentence. Nothing in the world is perfect.

Our dance around pronouns sometimes assumes grotesque dimensions. In an email, a student informed me that her cousin is sick and she has to take care of them. She does not know, she added, when they will be well enough, to allow her to attend classes. Not that I am inordinately curious, but it is funny that I was protected from knowing whether “they” are a man or a woman. In my archive, I have only one similar example (I quoted it long ago): “If John calls, tell them I’ll soon be back.” Being brainwashed may have unexpected consequences.

Earl and the Herulians

Our faithful correspondent Mr. John Larsson wrote me a letter about the word earl. I have a good deal to say about it. But if he has access to the excellent but now defunct periodical General Linguistics, he will find all he needs in the article on the Herulians and earls by Marvin Taylor in Volume 30 for 1992 (the article begins on p. 109).

The OED: Behind the scenes

Many people realize what a gigantic effort it took to produce the Oxford English Dictionary, but only insiders are aware of how hard it is to do what seems trivial to a non-specialist. Next year we’ll mark the centennial of James A. H. Murray’s death, and I hope that this anniversary will not be ignored the way Skeat’s centennial was in 2012. Today I will cite one example of the OED’s labors in the early stages of work on it. In 1866, Cornelius Payne, Jun. was reading John Vanbrugh’s plays for the projected dictionary, and in Notes and Queries, Series 3, No. X for July 7 he asked the readers to explain several passages he did not understand. Two of them follow. 1) Clarissa: “I wish he would quarrel with me to-day a little, to pass away the time.” Flippanta: “Why, if you please to drop yourself in his way, six to four but he scolds one Rubbers with you.” 2) Sir Francis:…here, John Moody, get us a tankard of good hearty stuff presently. J. Moody: Sir, here’s Norfolk-nog to be had at next door.” Rubber(s) is a well-known card term, and it also means “quarrel.” See rubber, the end of the entry. Norfolk-nog did not make its way into the dictionary because no idiomatic sense is attached to it: the phrase means “nog made and served in Norfolk” (however, the OED did not neglect Norfolk). Such was and still is the price of every step. Read and wonder. And if you have a taste for Restoration drama, read Vanbrugh’s plays: moderately enjoyable but not always fit for the most innocent children (like those surrounding us today).

The post Monthly etymology gleanings for November 2014 appeared first on OUPblog.

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If you are a young kid, and you are trying to spell a word, what do you do?

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If you are a young kid, and you are trying to spell a word, what do you do?

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This month-long series of blog posts will explain author websites and offer tips and writing strategies for an effective author website. It alternates between a day of technical information and a day of writing content. By the end of the month, you should have a basic author website up and functioning. The Table of Contents lists the topics, but individual posts will not go live until the date listed. The Author Website Resource Page offers links to tools, services, software and more.

Calling All Grammar Witches: Beta Readers for Your Site

You’re just days away from launching your new and improved Author Website. Now’s the time to proofread, test links and make sure everything is working! Recruit friends (and enemies?) to click around and make sure the site works.

• Links. Click on every single link to make sure it works.
• Grammar and Spelling. Grammar Witches, i love you. I’ll do everything you tell me to do.
• Photos. Add photos to every page, because it makes it more appealing.
• Tweak posts. OK, you’re a writer. You will be tweaking every single post. Just don’t stress out over this; write the best you can and let it go.

Fix everything that is reported to you. Make sure everything is in order for launch.

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I had to laugh this week when I got a spam email with the title, “Loose 8 Ponds Quickly!” Wow, did this spammer need a copy editor.

A copy editor finds all the pesky little errors of grammar and spelling. Many publishers use the Chicago Manual of Style as their style guide. Because here’s a secret they don’t teach in high school: grammar and to an extent spelling, is a matter of convention. Grammar is an agreed-upon set of rules for how we punctuation, conjugate and parse our language. There are different style guides and each has slightly different rules. And the language is evolving.

For example, I heard recently that quotation marks as a way to indicate speech are being disregarded in some new publications. That doesn’t make sense to me! I’m conventional. But for an edgy YA novel, maybe it would draw in a few new readers, which is language in the service of the story.

Do you need to study the Chicago Manual of Style? It wouldn’t hurt; but it’s unlikely that most writers need to do that intensive study. You do need a solid grounding of grammar, though. Unless your character is uneducated, speaks in a dialect, or is sick, s/he should speak in standard English. If you can’t manage that, then you should take a class somewhere.

I recently read a story that started, “Because him and his whole family were going out to do some camping.”

Wow. Embarrassing. Here’s how to keep from being embarrassed.

Spell Check. I’ve been lax lately about running a spell check on everything that goes out. But I was recently embarrassed by an obvious spelling error and it jerked me back to reality. Everyone can make mistakes, so you should use the tools available to write as cleanly as possible. Use your word processor’s spell check! Then run over it again to catch things like he/eh, for/four/fore, their/there, etc.

Grammar Check. Likewise, run your word processor’s grammar check. Always.

Study E.B. White’s Elements of Style. If you constantly find yourself mixing up things like for/four/fore or loose/lose, then you need to brush up on your skills. White’s book has a long list of easily confused words and is a handy reference. Or try the variations on this classic, Elements of Style: Illustrated, or The Elements of Style: Updated for Present-Day Use.

Use the online Chicago Manual of Style. Not sure what word usage is correct or how to punctuate something? Use the online Chicago Manual of Style to answer all questions.

Want to go farther and test the limits? OK. Once you know the standards, feel free to play. Here are some helpful books.

• Eats, Shoots, and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation




• It Was the Best of Sentences, It Was the Worst of Sentences




• The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English




• Spunk and Bite

What are your favorite grammar and style books?
And what standard grammar rules are being challenged by contemporary publishing?

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Open, hyphenated, or closed? Usage guides, dictionaries, and style manuals may differ in their treatment of the following words, so there’s not necessarily one right answer — except for the purposes of this exercise: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. All terms in this list are treated as open compounds. Which ones should be left as is, and which should be hyphenated or closed, and in which usages? The correct forms according to Merriam-Webster are listed at the bottom of the page.

1. Air borne
2. Anti social
3. Audio visual
4. Back log
5. Blood pressure
6. Book keeping
7. Bull’s eye
8. By law
9. Catch all
10. Check book
11. Child like
12. Clearing house
13. Court martial
14. Crew neck
15. Cross reference
16. Dog sled
17. Father land
18. Far reaching
19. First hand
20. Free style
21. Freeze dried
22. Fresh water
23. Go between
24. Great uncle
25. Half brother
26. High school
27. Higher ups
28. House hold
29. Inter agency
30. Key word
31. Jewel like
32. Land mass
33. Life size
34. Light year
35. Long term
36. Lower case
37. Main frame
38. Mass produced
39. Mid week
40. Mother ship
41. Multi purpose
42. Near collision
43. North west
44. Off shore
45. On site
46. Over supply
47. Pine cone
48. Pipe line
49. Policy maker
50. Post war
51. Pre existing
52. President elect
53. Pro life
54. Pseudo intellectual
55. Quasi realistic
56. Real time
57. Record breaker
58. River bed
59. Sea coast
60. Self control
61. Semi final
62. Shell like
63. Six pack
64. Snow melt
65. Socio economics
66. Step mother
67. Stomach ache
68. Strong hold
69. Toll free
70. Two fold
71. Under water
72. Vice president
73. Wild life
74. World wide
75. Year round

Answers

1. Airborne
2. Antisocial
3. Audiovisual
4. Backlog
5. Blood pressure (in the dictionary, so never hyphenate, except when combined with another adje

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By Anatoly Liberman In those rare cases in which people ask my advice about good writing, I tell them not to begin (to not begin?) their works with epigraphs from Mark Twain or Oscar Wilde, for the rest will look like an insipid anticlimax, and, disdainful of ground-to-dust buzzwords and familiar quotations, I also suggest that people avoid (naturally, like the plague) such titles as “A Tale of Two Friendships/ Losses/ Wars,” etc. and resist the temptation to

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By Anatoly Liberman

Question: How large is an average fluent speaker’s vocabulary?
Answer: I have often heard this question, including its variant: “Is it true that English contains more words than any other (European) language?”  The problem is that “an average fluent speaker” does not exist.  Also, it is important to distinguish between how many words we recognize (our so-called passive vocabulary) and how many we use in everyday communication (active vocabulary). The size of people’s active vocabulary depends on their needs, but it is rarely large.  Thus, five-year olds can say everything they want, but if they are read to and if grownups speak to them all the time, they understand complicated tales and the content of their parents’ conversation amazingly well (oftentimes much better than one could wish for).  Some people cultivate their conversational skills and make an effort to use “sophisticated” words in their dealings with the outside world; others are happy to remain at the level of first-graders. One of the most memorable events in my teaching career happened about thirty years ago when a student approached me after a lecture and, having complimented me (they always do in such cases), added: “But I don’t understand half of the words you use.”  Ever since that day I have worked systematically on reducing my “public” vocabulary but sometimes still forget myself.

Our passive vocabulary depends on our reading habits.  Since “great classics” are being frowned upon as elitist, the younger generation has trouble understanding even 19^th-century English (Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and so on, through Henry James and the utterly forgotten Galsworthy), while publishers promote books written more or less in Basic English.  Students get tired of following those authors’ synonyms, idioms, and convoluted syntax (their greatest compliments are matter of fact and down to earth, while all digressions are castigated as rambling).  The same is true, to an even greater extent, of their attempts to read Defoe, Fielding, and Swift.  For some Americans of college age even the vocabulary of Mark Twain poses difficulties.  It is hard to believe that Mark Twain, like Jack London and Charles Dickens, was self-taught.  Yet quite a few of our best and brilliantly educated writers did not make use of an extensive vocabulary.  Oscar Wilde is a typical example.  Others, like Dickens and Meredith, let alone James Joyce, made a heroic effort to use as many rare and learned words as possible.

Good dictionaries of English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, etc. seem to be equally thick.  In a dictionary containing about 60,000 words one can find practically everything one needs.  Webster’s Unabridged features seven or eight times more.  Obviously, none of us needs to know so much.  But perhaps two features distinguish English from its neighbors: an overabundance of synonyms (because of the partly unhealthy influx of Romance words) and the ubiquity of slang.  French also overflows with argot, but English dictionaries of slang (British, American, Canadian, Australian) are almost unbelievably thick.  This makes it harder to master current English than, for example, German, but each language has its difficulties.  English resorts  to all the usual international words (music, radio, antibiotic, and the like), while Icelandic prefers native coinages for such concepts.  It appears that whether you want to learn a foreign language or your own you have to make a sustained effort.  But then this is what the sweat of one’s brow is for.  Only Adam had an easy life: none of the objects around him had a name, and he was instructed to call them something (presumably he remembered his own neologisms).  His offspring ca

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By Anatoly Liberman

Allegedly a nineteenth-century Americanism, highfalutin is now known everywhere in the English speaking world, but, as could be expected, its etymology has not been discovered—“as could be expected,” because the origin of such words is almost impossible to trace.  Many years ago, while investigating the history of skedaddle, I think I found a reasonable source of this verb.  I was neither the first nor the second to discover it, but I put some polish (“kibosh,” as sculptors said 150 years ago) on it.  My thoughts on highfalutin are low-key for an obvious reason.  As will be seen, I have only one feeble idea and am offering it in the hope that, despite the lack of a persuasive solution, it may redirect the search for the source of this enigmatic adjective.  But before sharing my small treasure with the world, I would like to quote the explanation given in John Hotten’s Slang Dictionary (the spelling and punctuation of the original have been retained): “Highfaluten, showy, affected, tinselled, affecting certain pompous or fashionable airs, stuck-up—‘Come, none of your highfaluten games:’ American Slang, now common in Liverpool and the East End of London, from the Dutch Verlooten.  Used recently by The Times in the sense of fustian, highsounding unmeaning eloquence, bombast.”   (Note how often the names of cloths end up meaning ‘pompous speech’: here fustian and bombast, both reflecting the idea of padding.)  Hotten’s dictionary appeared in 1859, but I was quoting from the third edition (1864).

We notice three things in Hotten’s entry: the spelling (highfaluten), the use of the word in Liverpool and London, and the proposed etymology.  The etymology is fanciful.  Dutch verlooten (now spelled verloten) is a verb (the infinitive) meaning “to dispose of a thing by lottery, raffle.”  There is also Dutch loot “shoot; offspring.”  No connection can be established between either of them and highfalutin.  The ghost of a Dutch etymon was raised once again in 1902, when a contributor to Notes and Queries traced -faluting to verluchting “an airing” (luchtig “airy, thin, light; unsubstantial, etc.”)—thus, “flighty talk,” another dead-end proposal.  Unfortunately, Hotten’s derivation has been repeated in several popular books in which verloten was upgraded to an adjective meaning “high-flown, stilted.”  But two other features of Hotten’s comment have hardly been discussed at all.  I cannot imagine that by the middle of the 19^th century an Americanism mainly used at home in reference to the inanity and shallowness of official orations (this is the impression the earliest quotations make) reached Liverpool and even the East End of London.  The parents of those whom Jack London met and described in his 1902 book The People of the Abyss (it is about the slums of the East End) would hardly have known and appropriated this piece of American political slang.  I also doubt that The Times would have used it then; in the middle and even at the end of the 19^th century it was customary in England to pity the coarseness of “our American cousins” and resent Americanisms.  So I risk suggesting that the word is British, even though the first recorded examples are from the United States.  Finally, we see that Hotten did not hyphenate the word and spelled it highfaluten, not highfalutin, let alone high-faluting or high-falutin’.  He probably did not think that the second element of the compound was a participle.

The other conjectures on the derivation of highfalutin

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