yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Alienated | Vocabulary | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Hey wordsmiths! Just checking in; you doing okay? The word we're talking about today is "alienated."

"Alienated" it's an adjective and it means feeling excluded and apart from other people. Kind of a bummer word, but at the same time, a fascinating one. I can hear the question I imagine some of you are asking: "David, does this have anything to do with aliens, like from outer space?" And the answer is, well, kind of. It's all the same word!

Follow me, earthlings, to the derivation station! Let's talk about this word's origins. Did it come from outer space? No, it comes from Latin. "Alos" or "Alter" in Latin means different, other. Something that is alien is different, strange, new, and foreign. An alien is someone from another country, or in more modern language, a being from another planet.

And then "-ate" is a verb-forming suffix. It turns nouns and adjectives into action words. This robot is not active; I will activate it. Someone needs to assign a value to this artwork; I will evaluate it. Right, a very powerful suffix!

So let's put this knowledge to work. What are some words you can think of that contain that "al" root, that root that means other, or "-ate," the verb-forming suffix? Okay, here we go, people of Earth!

Music break!

Here are some words that I came up with: altruism, which means caring about other people, doing work for the sake of others; an alias, a word that means an assumed name, another name; and captivate, to capture someone's imagination or attention, to fascinate, to charm.

When you feel alienated, you feel like a stranger in your own country, like all the clocks are running backwards and the world is just wrong. I don't know why I'm trying to explain this to you, wordsmiths. Nobody understands the feeling of alienation better than the young. Alone in a crowd is the vibe.

Basically, let's use "alienated" in some sentences, shall we? The Galactic tourist felt alienated by the strange foodstuffs of this curious new planet. Oh no, the alien feels homesick and sad when they try to eat pizza; they don't know how to do it!

Here's one that hits a little bit closer to home: Noemi didn't get cast in the play, and it left her feeling alienated from her friends who did. There they are in the background, all crowded around the cast list. An awful feeling! All your friends have something to do together after school, and you can't be a part of it because you're not in the play. I certainly don't know what that's like!

Anyway, another word for alienation is estrangement, the feeling of being made strange, being made to feel far away. May you never feel that feeling, wordsmiths! Or if you do, may you never feel it for long. You can learn anything.

David out!

More Articles

View All
Paying for Cloud Storage is Stupid
Snatch and smash. It’s the viral trend that’s breaking all the rules, and maybe your phone. This clip, with over six million views on TikTok, shows an elderly man sneaking up on an unsuspecting Zoomer, snatching her phone, and smashing it right in front o…
Coupled reactions | Applications of thermodynamics | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
Coupled reactions use a thermodynamically favorable reaction to drive a thermodynamically unfavorable reaction. For example, let’s look at a hypothetical reaction where reactants A and B combine to form products C and I. The standard change in free energy…
New Crew, Same Pissah | Wicked Tuna
Chum and they will come with Lance. Brad and I, we are gonna catch a ton of tuna fish this year. Drop you like a bad habit. I’ve known Paul for about two and a half years. He’s a great guy; he’s a great fisherman. The reason why I’m fishing is to provide …
How Not to Be Pathetic | Stoic Philosophy & Emotions
English speakers often use the term “pathetic” in a derogatory manner, which characterizes weakness and helplessness in other people. Hence, most people don’t want to be pathetic, and we generally don’t like pathetic people. But what makes a person pathet…
Midpoint sums | Accumulation and Riemann sums | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
What we want to do in this video is get an understanding of how we can approximate the area under a curve. For the sake of an example, we’ll use the curve ( y = x^2 + 1 ). Let’s think about the area under this curve above the x-axis from ( x = -1 ) to ( …
Water Efficiency at Home | National Geographic
In the United States, we’re facing a national water shortage. Government-backed research shows that in a little over 50 years, half of the freshwater basins may not meet our demands. For this story, I’m in my home state of Florida. Here, the water crisis …