First, I want to thank my friend Adam for taking me on quite an interesting excursion the other day. I have not seen Adam for a few months since he goes to school in Utah so I was looking forward to seeing him two weekends ago. He was going to pick me up and he promised me an "adventure". Adam sure knows how to surprise a girl... he took me to Bruce's Salvage Yard. While Bruce remained elusive, we did see lots of cans, several airplane parts, a pile of bright copper pieces and a BBQ made from what looked like a metal oil drum.
According to my Kaplan GRE test book those who whinge and complain about the GRE tend to do poorly. It says I should look on it as a challenge to my intelligence...its turning out to be more of a challenge to my willpower and time management to actually study for this test. It is even more frustrating because I am not even 100% sure I want to go back to grad school. I made flashcards but I don't think they are helping that much since the words/roots I don't know, I still don't know after looking through them 15 times or so. I even tried studying with my brothers to see if it might help. They helped me to remember a few words. One was "enervate", which kept tricking me...I kept thinking it meant to energize (hey they look kind of similar!). When I asked my brothers if they knew that word, I was surprised when Andrew immediately responded, saying that "enervate means to weaken". "How did you know that?" I asked to which Andrew said: "DAOC (Dark Ages of Camelot, a computer game, for you normal people), duh! My Shadow Blade character "Aslan" uses a lesser enervating spell (or poison if you will) to weaken my enemies." My brothers then went on to use this to repudiate (oooh a GRE word I know) my constant claim that their computer games don't teach them anything. Another gem was when I asked them the definition of "dilettante". Andrew's definition was short and alliterative: a dilettante is a "d-bag".
So then I decided maybe I should list some words (from the top 100 GRE words list) I have had trouble with/gotten wrong on practice tests and see if you guys can come up with any memorable sentences/examples that could help me on the test. Unfortunately d-bag has such a myriad of different definitions and connotations I don't think I can memorize it as being synonymous with dilettante. But I won't be forgetting enervate! I look forward to your creativity! Any other advice regarding the GRE would be welcome!
Donnybrook- This was a word on the practice test and obviously skewed to test takers of Irish descent. And I didn't even know it.
Peregrination
Propitiate
Puissant
Ineffable
Imprecation
Opprobrium
Noisome (apparently not noisy!)
Aggrandize
Chicanery
Dissemble
Inchoate
Intransigent
Soporific
3 comments:
I only know the peregrin as a flying object and a pretty cool at that, although the Icelandic Gyrfalcon is way cooler (Bien sur). I have to say once more that this GRE test is absolutely ridiculous. If Americans don't even understand the words, how the hell is the rest of the world supposed to? We take the same test you see, if we want to do a masters or a phd in your vastly colleged country. I'd rather eat my Moshulu clogs than take this test... Therefore you will only see me as a visitor in the US... after you impeach Bush giggle giggle..
Dear Marion,
I'm an avid reader of your blog. Over the past 1000 entries I find that your brother Andrew is quite awesome. And though I was not actually there when he was explaining what enervate means. I'm pretty sure he described it in a less nerdy way than that.
Sincerely,
Anonymous reader (who is not Andrew )
PS-
insert funny comment here
kthxbai!
Yes Andrew is so awesome. Obviously he has read all of my "past 1000 entries". Maybe I should start devoting entries to things like your dishwasher incident to get you to read more often. Ooops I already wrote about that one...plenty more where that came from
Post a Comment