For years we have crouched under a whole-language loudspeaker that blared, "The direct study of vocabulary is not best practice. Students should discover words in the context of literature." Looking up words encountered in stories was good; studying vocabulary was bad. The attractive sound of that dogma obscured a critical fact: the stories students were reading in their dumbed-down textbooks contained neither the advanced vocabulary that had been removed from them nor the Latin-based vocabulary that becomes more prominent in higher-order academics. A foundation in Latin and Greek stems is a necessity in the curriculum for gifted children.