I definitely use it with my pre-teen to lighten the mood when he starts to ramp up.
DS1 uses The Good and the Beautiful for English and he doesn't particularly enjoy it, particularly the poetry aspects. We modify some lessons to make it more relevant for him. Yesterday he was to write a short poem for one of the lessons and he started to get a bit intense as we were discussing it. I was open to options but sometimes he gets a bit stuck and isn't really hearing me tell him a compromise is possible. So I handed him a dictionary, told him to look up belligerent, and suggested that he write down the definition for that instead of writing a poem today. He was amused when he looked up the definition, and in addition to writing the definition, he spent the next half hour self-learning about pronunciation keys as well as browsing other definitions just for fun. Works for me.