I wish there were more tests like this in general life, because my brobdingnagian (thanks, David Brin!) vocabulary is one of my strongest points. Even if it does all come from science fiction.

Some pairings seem quite strange to me, eg, exasperate and exacerbate. Possibly I should more thoroughly regret that my thesaurus is a long way away.

Noticed a weird tendency to knee-jerk click on selections that were the opposite of what I wanted, when going too fast. So, possibly could have gained/lost about 10 points either way through such mistakes.

This was fun!

:-)

Vera

MKK

Having a trick memory for quotes and context helps.

Now I'm going to try to find a way to use the words contango and backwardation in a sentence.

I got 180. Supposing my memory of the test to magically have been wiped, I am not sure I could do that again. I did guess.

Pamela

We got 185. I don't think we got a lot of benefit out of taking it together. And -- this is a petty descent into special pleading -- I don't think that compendious and extended are more logically opposed than they are similar.

It was great fun. Imagine me standing behind Patrick at his desk, while we say things like "Poikilo-, poikilo-, oh shoot I know that one, dammit..."

And yes, Kathryn, John Clute was invoked. I think it was when we got to haptic, tactile.

I too owe inspissate to the good Dr. Maturin, as well as rebarbative (I think).

Off to the dictionary to learn more words. Thanks for the link!

I've never heard the word "gumption" used outside of the "boldness" context, where it means something like "guts and stubborness, combined with perhaps a slight dose of being knocked upside the head while young."
It might be like an across-the-pond Pop vs. Soda phenomenon.

According to the intro text on that site, 165 is at the 99.9th percentile of general adult population. If falling into the top tenth of one percent counts as unfortunate for you, then you're probably in favor of Bush's tax plan.

In, I should say, Greg Bear's The Serpent Mage.

LH: "arcane and daedal," yes! ... I don't suppose you collect antonyms?

Webster's 1913 (via dict.org) agrees with the test author and defines "compendious" as "Containing the substance or general principles of a subject or work in a narrow compass; abridged; summarized," so I suppose that a compendium is comprehensive but compressed and antonymical with "extended."

The dict.org dictionaries don't have "trefa," but present "terefah" (defined in WordNet) as a synonym for tref/treyf.

I have such a strong OmniDictionary habit that it was hard to keep my hands from automatically popping it up and cheating on the test. 171 was an honest best effort while in a hurry, and not bad for an engineer.

Half a dozen of my "wrong" answers were in fact slips of the mouse -- I do indeed know the difference between kosher and treyf, however spelt -- but I assume a comparable number fell the other way, too, crediting me with undeserved wisdom.

Did anyone else detect a tendency towards polysyllables after undergoing this examination?

Perhaps I haven't yet hit the Aubrey/Maturin book with inspissate. I'm in no particular hurry to come to the end of them.

Oh, and I join the muttering about fifth column and collaberationist.

I had fun taking the test. There must be something very, very wrong with me. :-)

I obviously need to go back to reading that Reader's Digest Feature on improving your word power. Sigh.

In my youth I kept hearing people telling me I didn't have "gumption," by which they appeared to mean some combination of courage and stick-to-it-iveness. I was recently surprised to learn that it was supposed to be common sense. I still don't have it.

I guess our hosts remember Wolfe better than Ballard; I took a couple of years of bio but knew XxxThermic from the "poikilochronistic jungle" in I-forget-which story. And the only reason I knew "pyknic" was from Leiber's contrasting it with "asthenic" in describing the physiotypes of the Sackabonds in A Specter Is Haunting Texas.

My favorite: fluvial/potamic; possibly Flanders and Swann were what reminded me of the literal meaning of "hippopotamus". I'll have to see how my sister-with-the-classical-diploma does on this....

Definitely fun. Thanks!

Poikilothermic, yes, of course. For the last ... um, I'm not sure how long, I've been losing words. You can imagine how vexing that is. (My writing speed is dropping, too. If I didn't have such a curtailed attention span, I'd be seriously worried.) This isn't just the tardy memory access of middle age. I lose words progressively during the day, starting each morning with my head full of them; then by late afternoon, the edifice of language has more gaps in it than bricks. Patrick and I took the test at the end of a workday, and poikilo- had fallen through one of the gaps. Thus my frustration.

You're also right about me and Ballard. He doesn't engage my imagination the way Wolfe does. Wolfe's city of Nessus, for instance; it sat quietly in the back of my mind until I went to Rome, when it unfolded in a useful burst of light. Nessus showed me Rome, and Rome showed me Nessus. Without that, the city would have been like New York or the Grand Canyon: a thing whose nature and magnitude you can't take in until it's had some time to sort itself out in your head -- and I didn't have that much time there.

So pin this one up in the gallery of unusable quotes: The Book of the New Sun was every bit as illuminating as my Rough Guide and my phrasebook.

BUT....

Are you publishing lie detector tests tomorrow? ;)

And, don't read too much into this folks, vocabulary tests are not a reliable, or valid, single measure of IQ.

Well, that's my excuse, and I'm sticking with it :)

Aieeee (I'm saying that a lot today -- it's been one of those days)

Avert! Avert! Danger Will Robinson! Danger! Danger!

IQ Tests and validity are not words to use in the same sentence. Or even the same post.

MKK