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Welcome to your GrammarBook.com e-newsletter.
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Test Your Vocabulary
“The richer and more copious one’s vocabulary and the greater one’s awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the
more fertile and precise is likely to be one’s thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know
the words, you can hardly know the thing.”
―Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science
Here is another of our intermittent vocabulary tests. The answers directly follow the quiz.
1. arcane
A) evil
B) sweet
C) mysterious
D) curved
2. temerity
A) boldness
B) fear
C) inflexibility
D) foresight
3. feckless
A) uninformed
B) sterile
C) incompetent
D) distasteful
4. precipitous
A) unexpected
B) edgy
C) clean
D) steep
5. stolid
A) muscular
B) impassive
C) watchful
D) confused
6. egregious
A) outrageous
B) angry
C) desperate
D) life-changing
7. trenchant
A) watery
B) sharp
C) melodic
D) handy
8. assuage
A) demolish
B) predict
C) relieve
D) condemn
9. protean
A) healthy
B) versatile
C) unruly
D) implausible
10. oxymoron
A) a complete fool
B) a muscular bully
C) a legal document that voids a contract
D) a phrase that seems to contradict itself
ANSWERS
1: C) mysterious. Their arcane habits and practices shocked our Western eyes.
2: A) boldness. He had the temerity to disobey the judge’s orders.
3: C) incompetent. Rita’s feckless cousin just lost another job.
4: D) steep. The young hikers turned back, unwilling to scale the precipitous cliffs.
5: B) impassive. I wished that my class of stolid undergraduates were more interested in what was happening around them.
6: A) outrageous. This was an egregious act of betrayal.
7: B) sharp. Oscar’s trenchant wit won him many an argument.
8: C) relieve. To assuage her guilt, she decided to change her ways.
9: B) versatile. He is a protean musician who can play in almost any style.
10: D) a phrase that seems to contradict itself. Isn’t “jumbo shrimp” an oxymoron?
Because of the e-newsletter’s large readership, please submit your English usage questions through GrammarBook.com’s “Grammar Blog.” |
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The Blue Book of Grammar
and Punctuation
by Jane Straus, Lester Kaufman, and Tom Stern
The Authority on English Grammar!
Eleventh Edition Now Available
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- Hundreds of Grammar, Punctuation, Capitalization, and Usage Rules
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through Wiley.com and get 30 percent off and FREE shipping. Simply go to bit.ly/1996hkA and use discount code E9X4AYY.
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 Wordplay
Rules for Writing Good: Writing Tips
Beginning this week, we are going to run selections from a perverse set of rules that are guilty of the very mistakes they seek to prevent. English teachers, students, scientists, and writers have been circulating these self-contradictory rules for more than a century.
1. Don’t be a person whom people realize confuses who and whom.
2. Never use no double negatives.
3. When writing, participles must not be dangled.
Learn all about who and whom, affect and effect, subjects and verbs, adjectives and adverbs, commas, semicolons, quotation marks, and much more by just sitting back and enjoying these easy-to-follow lessons. Tell your colleagues (and boss), children, teachers, and friends. Click here to watch. |
