COMPROMISE provides yet another example of a word with multiple meanings. Most students know that COMPROMISE describes a mutual agreement reached by making concessions. For example, delegates to the Constitutional Convention settled a bitter dispute between large and small states by reaching a COMPROMISE over how power would be divided in the new federal legislature. According to the terms of the Great Comprise, the Constitution created a bicameral Congress with representation in the House of Representatives based on population and a Senate in which each state received two senators regardless of its size or population.
It is a long way from the COMPROMISE at the Constitutional Convention to the COMPROMISED or weakened and damaged accounts of the American novelist Willa Cather. Best known for her novels of life on the Great Plains, Cather left a will in which she forbade scholars from directly quoting from her private letters. This unusual stipulation has forced researchers to paraphrase rather than directly cite her original statements. The approximations have resulted in factual misreadings that have COMPROMISED the accuracy of Cather’s life and thoughts.
The Willa Cather passage further confused students by using INCONSEQUENTIAL, as a tempting but incorrect answer. INCONSEQUENTIAL means lacking in importance of significance. The stipulation in Cather’s will was clearly not INCONSEQUENTIAL. However, a close reading of the passage does not support this answer. Instead, the passage directly focuses on how scholarly “approximations” produced “distorted language and factual misreadings” that COMPROMISED or damaged Cather’s biographical record.
COMPROMISED – weakened, damaged; made vulnerable
INCONSEQUENTIAL – insignificant; unimportant
APUSH BONUS EXAMPLE
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 illustrates both meanings of the word COMPROMISE. Negotiated largely by Speaker of the House Henry Clay, the COMPROMISE allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and Maine to enter the Union as a free state. The agreement further banned slavery from the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase territory north of latitude 36 – 30. While the deal defused an immediate controversy, it also COMPROMISED the country’s future unity by separating free and slave states by an arbitrary geographic line. This set the stage for a deeper ideological conflict that eventually unraveled four decades later in the American Civil War.