It's a bit silly to give words like abstruse and affidavit to a 7-year-old. Children that age won't use those words and will just forget them.
Really, doesn't it depend on the child?
Sort of. In my experience, 7-year-olds (even gifted ones) don't talk about affidavits. They're legally too young to give them and besides, as was pointed out, they lack the context to understand what an affidavit even is.
In a wider context, my kids are all superior in their verbal abilities, but they don't get their big vocabularies from word lists. They get them in context-specific ways, like an interest in paleontology or through reading a lot of books or from hearing us talk. Context is a constant, and so is the fact that words are encountered repeatedly, in a meaningful way.
As Zen Scanner pointed out, the words that started this thread appear to have been grabbed from an online source and thought doesn't appear to have gone into picking them.
Honestly, I don't see much point in handing out long lists of random vocabulary words to kids. When the words in a list are taken from a book that the kids are reading, that's great. There's a context and the kids are likely to encounter the words more than once in the book (e.g.
blunderbuss in a historical novel). But when words get pulled out of the ether and tossed out for memorizing, I don't see the point. It's like a cheap, industrial method that cranks out words but little else. Everyone feels good because lots of big words have been assigned and tests have been administered. But no one thinks about what happens to last week's list next week when we stop using
affidavit and
abstruse because we're busy memorizing
blighted,
beneficent, and
bastion.*
*Oops! I didn't put those words in alphabetical order! That's ten points detracted from my grade.
