Vocabulary Woes . . .

Friday afternoon, Liz was scrambling to make photo-copies in the English office, but the machine was jammed, and so I gallantly offered to walk across the school to the copy room and make her the copies (I actually wasn't being that chivalrous, I was hung-over and needed some exercise and a purpose in my life) and she thanked me and said, "Can you judge it for me, also?" and for a moment I was stumped-- I assumed "judging it" was some obscure photo-copy terminology . . . perhaps it meant to shrink down the text and copy it horizontally, like leaves in a book or something . . . and so I said, "I don't know how to do that," but she explained that she just wanted me to attempt the quiz and decide if it was fair-- so as I walked across the building I took a look at it, but when I saw it was a matching vocabulary quiz I nearly lost interest (because as everyone who has the patience to listen to me knows, I claim to be a walking dictionary) but then I noticed that this was no ordinary vocabulary quiz . . . it was only seven words, but these were the words: convivial, congenial, amicable, affable, jocular, levity, and cordial . . . and, you had to discern between seven extremely similar matching definitions, and needless to say, I did NOT get 100% and perhaps my claim that I am a walking dictionary is a bit overblown . . . but perhaps I'm a walking thesaurus.

6 comments:

Whitney said...

Levity should have been easy because it's the only noun.

Dave said...

correct-- it was the easy one. convivial was easy too-- food and drink!

zman said...

Dave and KRS-ONE are the only people I ever heard refer to themselves, straight-facedly, as walking dictionaries.

Dave said...

do i do anything straight-facedly?

rob said...

has anyone ever seen dave and krs-one in the same room?

Liz said...

Dear Dave,

I think it Was gallant, and chivalrous (and dashing, dauntless, heroic, and magnanimous) even if you were hung over and looking for exercise.

A New Sentence Every Day, Hand Crafted from the Finest Corinthian Leather.