Thursday, November 28, 2013

vocabulary

Boy, was that ever humbling.

At Protein Wisdom in comments I clicked on somebody's name and was taken to Infinitests where on the side are radio buttons; Vocabulary, Ancient Greece, Biographies, Shakespeare, Miscellaneous, so I press "Vocabulary" and a page opens up of forty radio buttons.

Glee fills my heart.

This is my sort of thing. I feel like I'm winning already. I pick a radio button in the middle. Test 15.

I have no idea what these words are referring to. I never heard them. Never saw them. I've seen things close but only a few are confidently answered. It is not good at all. One word was like "misonamy" or maybe "misology" it was not misogamy and it was not mixology there was no answer relating to mushrooms or hatred of women, or study of anything. Finally I got a 60 where 80 is passing, so fail.

What a bummer.

Bad thing is, I didn't learn anything.

Oh, I see, when you click through it tell you where you went wrong. I did as poorly on test 1.

11 comments:

sakredkow said...
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Mumpsimus said...

I took Test 15 twice, and got some different words -- four of them I think -- the second time. It would be interesting to know how variable each iteration is, and how large and how difficult the total word list is.

You must have gotten a tough assortment.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I got 4 out of 10 on test 2

Its tricky because they give you plausible sounding definitions of words that are similar to the word they are asking about.

Some of the words were familiar Latin and I still didn't do as well as I should have.

like anomie

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I got 5 out of 10 on test 12.

Most of them I was guessing.

rhhardin said...

The Quintessential Dictionary is the place to learn words.

About 500-1000 words that are actually used.

Make flash cards and learn them all.

You can read all of Buckley without looking anything up.

Entertaining citations.

bagoh20 said...

I always find new words and think "wow, what a great word. I need to use that from now on." Then I think, "wait, nobody else knows that freaking word so they will just think I'm a ninnyhammer."

Chip Ahoy said...

Thanks for the recommendation, rhhardin, I saw your review on Amazon.

The other reviewers said, if you do not know these words
quiescent
c'est la vie
elan
then this is the book for you!


I look up everything I don' t recognize. It is a pathetic habit. Now I look up words and and the computer says, "you already have a card on that." So I say make another one. Now there are two.

Wanna see 'em? They are a word-card museum.

But these definitions on this here test of dodgy, some are. It's like the Reader's Digest sometimes the correct answer is a poor one, barely even close, kind of / sort of , maybe, but not really. That is the type of place I could mine go through them and double check their crap answers. Just because they made the test doesn't mean they're right. It could be s sinister plot to mal-educate me.

virgil xenophon said...

For a quickie I took test #15, 25 & 35. My scores were 90, 70, and 50, respectively. So much for my vaunted widely-read mind and 153 IQ.

(Which isn't much. Imus has an IQ of 164 while the world's greatest particle-physicist after Einstein, Richard Feynman had an IQ of only 127. "To think I have done so much with so little" he said thru tears of laughter. Of course MENSA is full of letter-carriers with IQs north of 200, so go figure..)

Simon Kenton said...
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Simon Kenton said...

1 - 90
15 - 100

Always been lexiphanic, though.

XRay said...

SK - smart ass - I had to look that up. Thanks. :-)