mother. To make the connection personal, picture the word itself
next to an image of this person in your mind.z Fourth, take the time to explore the word in a little more depth.
ż In this case, you might learn that the root of factotum, fac, is
from the Latin verb facio, meaning “to make or do.” Another
English word that starts with fac is factory, a place where
things are made. The key word factory can help you remember
the meaning of the root fac.
ż In addition, the Latin word totum—the second part of
factotum—means “all.” Thus, a factotum is someone who
“does it all.” If you remember factotum in this way, you’ll
never forget it.z To make factotum memorable, we used four principles of
vocabulary learning; we’ll use these same principles throughout
the course:
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that distills the critical aspects of what the word means—and
what it doesn’t mean.
ż Context. We will then place each target word in the context of
a sentence to get a feel for how it’s actually used. Remember, if
you want to really know a shark, you study it in the ocean—its
natural habitat. If you want to really know a word, you study
how it behaves in its natural habitat—sentences, paragraphs,
and books.ż Connections. We’ll make connections to each word. Think of
a vocabulary word as a label for an underlying concept. With
factotum, you already knew the basic concept—everyone
knows someone who does a little bit of everything—but you
may not have had the label for it—the word factotum. We
connected the new word/label to your known concept.