studying for the GRE’s
Studying for the GRE is most amusing. If you are clever, you will combine all the study techniques you ever learned to come up with something engaging, entertaining and effective. For example, The Kaplan Test Preparation Book suggests that instead of studying the definitions of individual words you should study word lists. These are lists of words that all have the same general meaning. A language study course I used for studying Russian last spring suggested that you make situations come alive in your mind, so that you don’t just memorize words but incorporate them into your brain’s language center automatically. The collusion of these two study techniques produces the following types of dialogs in my head:
Jim: John, I find the pile of food you are eating to be fetid. It is full of festering fauna. It is fulsome, invidious, completely noisome. In a word, it is foul.
John: Well I find your comment abstruse, arcane, obtuse. Your logic is enigmatic. The entire idea is inscrutable, obscure, opaque. You tend toward this kind of rarefied, recondite, turbid idiocy.
Jim: I tell you the food is foul, you intractable, obdurate fellow. You are the most implacable, obstinate, pertinacious person I know. You are completely recalcitrant and untoward. You are inexorably linked to your intransigent refractory opinions.
John: Why are you being so churlish, you irascible curmudgeon? You are a malevolent misanthrope. Your words are antithetic, truculent and vindictive.
Jim: Ha! Where did you learn to be so bombastic? I find your circumlocution and grandiloquence to be in poor taste. I have ever known you to be garrulous, but this type of periphrastic prolixity is quite turgid.
John: You are a depraved person. Not only do you insult everyone you know, but you do so while maintaining a dissipated, libertine, licentious life-style. How dare you speak words of censure to me, you bacchanalian reprobate? You have indulged in every kind of iniquity. Your very aura radiates your libidinous, sordid turpitude. You are a debauched, ribald, salacious fellow.
Jim: How can you throw such aspersions at my head? You dare to belittle, to berate, to derogate my very person? What is this calumny? This defamation? It was quite a diatribe! Do you enjoy haranguing me? Does it make you feel good to inveigh against me, to pillory, rebuke, remonstrate, reprehend, reprove and revile me? What did I do to deserve such excoriating castigation? You lambaste me with such vituperation that I know not even how to chastise you for it.
John: You know well how to chastise me, you are just craven. You are a diffident pusillanimous timorous creature. You are recreant and filled with trepidation, you coward.
Jim: Of all the injurious and inimical things to say! You are a perfidious, pernicious man. You words are insidious, deleterious and minatory. You very presence is baleful. You are the bane of peaceful men.
John: You are just trying to enervate me. You are trying to obviate the force of my words. If you could, you would stultify me, undermine my reason and vitiate the strength of my arguments.
Jim: Well, I admit that you have an acerbic tongue in your head. You throw out caustic acrimonious words with asperity. In makes nothing to you to be acidulous, mordant, mordacious and trenchant.
John: Ha! You are quite out there, fellow. I have been known, when circumstances deserve, to be quite laudatory of my fellow men. It is in my nature to extol the beauty of the world in soft words. I can express veneration easily. It is my natural way to constantly eulogize, aggrandize, spray forth accolades and encomiums to the world. It is very difficult for me to do otherwise.
Jim: That speech was quite beautiful but absolutely apocryphal. How can you dissemble in such a way? I hadn’t even suspected you of such duplicity, of such guile. What crazy kind of equivocation are you engaging in? For anyone, such as I, with knowledge of your character, your statements are obviously erroneous, fallacious, mendacious, specious and spurious. You prevaricate with such ease. Your persona is clearly ersatz.
John: And yours is clearly banal. Do you always spew such fatuous, hackneyed, insipid comments? I find you mundane, pedestrian, prosaic, trite, in other words, quotidian. Such platitudes, indeed!
Jim: You know, you are beginning to annoy me. I feel distinctly perturbed, vexed, irked, irritated, aggravated. I must go. I will leave you to your fetid food. Enjoy!
No matter how you fashion these dialogs in your mind - they are always extremely negative. All the important words for the GRE seem to have negative connotations. I wonder why.