Ability, Heroic, Villain | Vocabulary

0:00- [David] Never fear, wordsmiths, it is I, Vocabulary Man, here to save the day and teach you to read and stuff. Fine, I may have the ability to leap over whole dictionaries, understand new or unusual words, and bring deadly, dull sentences back to life, but so can you.

0:19But will you be heroic with your language, or will you be a villain? Okay, so those are our words for this video, I wanna go through what they mean and how to use them. First, ability. Ability. It's a noun, a person, place, thing or idea. It means being able to do something.

0:43I have the amazing ability to fold my tongue in half, like so, you can't see it, but I'm doing it. Word number two, heroic. Heroic. It's an adjective, a describing word. It means like a hero. Very brave. And finally, villain. Villain. It's a noun, this is the kind of person, it means the main bad character in a story.

1:12What's cool about these two chunks of words here is that they change the meaning of each word, these are called suffixes, they go at the ends of words. "-ity," I-T-Y, is a suffix that makes words into nouns, it isn't a word on its own, you can't say, "I'll have an 'ity' sandwich for lunch," but it can turn adjectives into noun, so for example, the word pure becomes purity, the quality of being pure, pureness, the word real becomes reality, the state of being real, of realness, and able becomes ability, the quality or state of being able to do something, so turns an adjective into a noun, and "-ic" is a suffix that makes words into adjectives, into describing words, so we can even say it probably goes the other way

2:00from noun to adjective. We can take a noun like acid, an add "-ic," and you get acidic, an adjective that means like acid or sour, so you might say that a lemon tastes acidic, so something heroic is like a hero. Anyway, let's use these words in some sentences.

2:23"As Icicle Girl, Celia had the ability to freeze anything, which made her fun at parties." Frozen watermelon, anyone? This was something she could do, she was able to freeze stuff. "It was heroic to try walking Sparky, the world's strongest dog." Sparky may look small, but she pulls with the strength of 50 ordinary dogs.

2:48"Dr. Split-Ends, the barber villain, was about to use his bad-hair ray on the whole city!" You see? A terrible thing to do, a villainous thing, a thing that bad guy would do, ruin everyone's hair. Sorry, wordsmiths, that's the Vocabul-signal, I must away, but remember, you can learn anything.

3:09David out! (loud crashing) (gentle electronic music)