Week 1 Vocabulary list - Precipitate

[KillaB3E]

Hello,

Precipitate is one of the Week 1 vocabulary words and has six different meanings according to the week 1 handout. Is there a priority of meanings that I should try to memorize or should I try to memorize all of the meanings?

Thank you,

[jen]

I think the most common meaning is "hasten." As in, "We were vacillating about which route to take, but the incoming storm precipitated our decision." (Haha, I made a pun! Well, sort of. [Precipitate also = rain])

With any word that has a lot of definitions, you can
1) Look it up on wordnik.com or just Google it to see how it's really being used
2) Try to find a commonality in all the definitions so that all the different uses just *make sense*, and you don't really have to memorize much. Many of the definitions of "precipitate" share the idea of something happening suddenly -- precipitating a decision means that the decisionmakers really might not have been ready, just as we're often not ready when it starts to rain, and no one is ever ready to fall off a cliff :)

A similar word is "stock" -- if you look it up, you'll find a bajillion definitions. But they all have something in common -- the idea of something that there is a lot of, and where the different units are interchangeable or replaceable, or kind of a generic base for something else.

Sincerely,
Jen