It’s the end of September and this blogger is thinking about her first days of graduate school way back in the Fall of 1998. The first quarter of graduate school can be a total mind-fuck—particularly when you don’t have a dictionary that weighs at least 10 pounds or a subscription to the OED online. For the benefit of Rivet readers who may be entering grad school to study a humanaties-oriented discipline or just want to sound over-educated, here is a selected list of words, guaranteed to make you fit in during seminars or happy hour. Look ‘em up. Learn them. Love them. Drop them.

bifurcation
modality
dialectic
problematic
ostensibly
hermeneutic
polemic
polemicist
epistemology
discourse

Words You Think You Know How to Define but Probably Don’t
culture
perspective
democratic
federal
gender
ethnicity
masculine
feminine
male
female
psyche
dialogue