Words

[owlectomy]

So like everybody else, I'm addicted to Free Rice. Considering I haven't had my Hard English Words receptors turned on for a good long while (98% of my English reading is YA, blogs, popular nonfiction, adult novels that are neither particularly literary nor particularly archaic... not that I'm proud of that, you know? But there are only so many hours in a day) I'm surprised at the workarounds I'm able to use when I have no clue about a word.

Anglo-saxon word? Probably a concrete noun. See if it could be from French. (eg. bosk : bosque)
Foreign? Probably a concrete noun for something vaguely exotic.
French? If I can't get it with my middling French vocabulary, it has a high probability of being military.
Latinate? Could be almost anything, but bet on medical or abstract.
If I sort of remember it at a little corner of my memory I'd bet on it being medieval military from D&D.

It's weird where I get some of these words--I think rappee is from Doctor Dolittle or one of the other children's books I haven't read since I was seven or eight. I have no idea where I learned autoclave, since I don't know what it means, except for Something Related To Science. And saleratus I got from a splendid storytime book called Sody Saleratus.

I have made it all the way to 50, but never for very long.

Comments

[severefun.livejournal.com]

I am a broken man now that you've introduced me to this. And yes, I too am shamed by how many words I sortaknow thanks to TSR.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The uses of a classical education and many summers attending the Stratford Shakespearian festival. I've got to 50 too- but then I always flub one.

[owldaughter.livejournal.com]

Wow, this is great! And I've just lost half an hour.

And it's addictive. I keep hitting 48 and then tripping over words I should know better, get bumped down, and then try to get back up because I'll hit 50 just to prove to myself that I can if it kills me. And then there's the whole 'ooh I'm so close to X grains of rice, I'll just raise that to the next hundred mark... thousand mark...' and so forth.

So dead.