“I’m going to cut you.”

It was my first day on the job as a teacher, and I stood face to face with an angry not-quite-sane teen holding a broken bottle up to my neck. I had just broken up a fight and tossed one kid behind a locked door to protect him. Turning, I faced the other, only to find a jagged edge of a broken bottle pressed against my throat. If I challenged the kid, it would be testosterone city, male toe-to-toe, lock horns time, and the kid would feel he had to follow through on his jugulating threat.
On the other hand, I couldn’t let him eviscerate the other kid behind the door, either. Besides, the door was locked and the rest of the staff was huddled safe and sound behind it. I was alone, with no safety net, staring down this teenage menace in a school for emotionally troubled youth.
“Well, you can cut me,” I offered coolly, “but you still won’t get through that door.”
The boy looked a tad confused, his eyes shifted back and forth as he weighed his options: I hadn’t locked horns with him, but he still wasn’t getting what he wanted. He dropped his hands, cursed and walked away.  As I strutted through the office, I was slapped on the back many times by the teachers and administrators for my composed diplomacy. Reaching the bathroom, I calmly shut the door.
“They didn’t mention this in the teacher manual,” I reflected and then spilled my cookies into the bowl.
It was in this atmosphere that I came up with Vicious Vocabulary. Initially, I came up with a lesson of twenty insults.  I was going to come up with a follow up test the next week to see if my theory held, that students would be more likely to remember an insult than random words.  Unfortunately, with all the drive-bys, teacher strikes and race riots I plum forgot.  Five weeks went by and then one sleepy Monday morning one of my students slumped into class, thumped her books on her desk and whimpered, “Mr. Eisenhower, men are nothing but lying sycophants!”
That convinced me I had something.  It took me years to finish the book and now I offer it to everyone: gangsters, students and teachers.  May this book help you rise above your diabolical foes and whittle them down to size.  I no longer teach in the classroom.  I miss the students, but not the broken bottles.Phil Eisenhower, a teacher at some of the toughest schools in Los Angeles, wanted his students to remember difficult vocabulary words. He tried an experiment. He took words commonly found on SAT and GRE exams and phrased them as funny insults, like flagrant faker, obsequious twit, exiled pariah. It worked! He discovered that if new words are introduced as barbs, people find ways to use them and remember them.