Thursday, September 13, 2007

Test Your Lexical Command

There are busy days and there are days like today. My brain was primed and ready to create, but with virtually nothing to do, I settled for thumbing through my pocket thesaurus for a while. Overall, Miriam-Webster’s Pocket Thesaurus is greatly lacking, but I did find some nice words to satiate my intellectual hunger. And what better way to share this knowledge than to give an old-fashioned vocab quiz.

So get out some college rule notebook paper, I’ll give you the words today and the definitions tomorrow. See how many you can get (I would have gotten 0 out of 10), don’t cheat off your neighbor’s test, and make sure to use a #2 pencil.

You may begin.


1. couchant

2. galumph

3. pasquinade

4. otiose

5. coxcomb

6. thaumaturgy

7. animadversion

8. frowzy

9. pap

10. raillery

3 comments:

MDD said...

Goddamn, Shaft. Those are some toughies.

3/10:

Otiose=useless
Raillery=joking
Pap=pablum

I think I saw coxcomb and galumph while reading in a nightmare once. (My dream life is nearly as boring as my waking life, sadly.)

Bryan said...

You certainly have those right Mr. Duncan. And I commend your honesty. I would've lied, looked up the definitions, and said I got 9/10.

Zack said...

Pap = Tom Hank's character in Dragnet. Pap Streebeck, I believe.