<p>^^^Stop making me look up all of these long-haired hippie words…argggg…and please, nothing with more than two syllables… X_X </p>
<p>Sorry, this one is more than 2 syllables, but I heard “enormity” being used wrong on NPR this past week. It doesn’t mean just the quality of being very large. You can check out the online dictionary of your preference, but “bad,” “morally wrong,” “crime,” and “sin” (on an extreme scale) all show up in my search.</p>
<p>This word is so commonly misused that it probably will come to mean “it’s huge,” with no other qualifier.</p>
<p>A consequence of that: Hardly anyone will get the joke in Bilbo’s remark to Smaug, "“Truly, the tales and songs fall utterly short of your enormity, O Smaug the Stupendous.”</p>
<p>QM, languages are fluid, and more than a few words have lost their meanings when borrowed from the original language. In the case of enormity, the origin of the latin is simply “out of norm.” Looking at the french use of enormité, one will not see the “sinister” connotations. At best, the term would describe something extravagant. </p>
<p><a href=“Définitions : énormité - Dictionnaire de français Larousse”>http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/énormité/29703</a></p>
<p>The are other examples such as celibacy, which lost its original latin meaning (caelibatus) of merely being unwed to adopt one that includes abstaining from sexual relations. </p>
<p>The unfortunate fact remains that incorrect words and meaning, when repeated enough, become the … norm. Pun intended. And this explains why we have such enormities as “comprised of” (which makes ZERO sense grammatically.) My favorite? All those morons paid to read the news who insist there is such a thing as an amPItheater and miss the “ph” as in telephone. </p>
<p>PS I used the word sinister as a pun, as it once only meant to describe the left side and not the current bad, evil, base, or wicked and disastrous. Someone must have been describing the state of US politics that are left-leaning. /insert smiley</p>
<p>I recognize that word usage change with time.</p>
<p>Tolkien was using “enormity” in its (accurate, nit-pickey, choose one) sense, though, and if that sense becomes lost, then so will Tolkien’s joke.</p>
<p>Additionally, older texts that speak about the “enormity” of the Holocaust will be understood in an incomplete way, if the word usage changes.</p>
<p>“Enormity” is an interesting one, because very few people would think to look it up, if they don’t actually know its meaning. I credit columns by Sidney Harris (read as a child) for the fact that I don’t need iPhone apps for vocabulary.</p>
<p>“all the non-sense about becoming “more like the ACT” can be buried.”</p>
<p>Eliminating the GRE vocabulary is indeed a way of becoming more like the ACT. That may not be why they did it, but it is a fact. It’s going to make the test more coachable, too.</p>
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<p>This confuses this nit picker! Was it Tolkien’s joke or one written by a contemporary stable of writers a few years back? I thought that Tolkien’s line that followed the word “tremendous” was:</p>
<p>"Truly songs and tales fall utterly short of the reality, O Smaug the Chiefest and greatest of Calamities.” </p>
<p>PS I agree with you about the use of enormity of the Holocaust. </p>
<p>You are quite right, xiggi. I didn’t give the screen-writers enough credit. Also, that answers a question that had been bothering me: Did Tolkien’s children actually know the meaning of “enormity” when they were quite young? Evidently, they did not need to know.</p>
<p>Are there American and British versions of Tolkien’s books? I recall that the Harry Potter books were altered for the ignorant American reader (who wouldn’t, for example, be able to understand what the “Philosopher’s Stone” might be).</p>
<p>No the Tolkien books were not bowdlerized for the American public. And I suspect it was doing things like reading Tolkien and the like in 3rd grade meant that my kids were not stymied by SAT words. (Though I have to admit my kid who was reading something British imagined flaming torches not flashlights at one point in the story.)</p>
<p>Just as an aside, I’ll never understand why xiggi thinks using obscure meanings for common words is a better tests than just slightly obscure words. We got one of those boxes of SAT words when the kids were in high school - I think there were only a few that we didn’t all know.</p>
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<p>Could it, perhaps, be because Xiggi does NOT say (or think) such things! As far as I know, I never wrote that using secondary or tertiary meanings (not necessarily obscure) makes for a better test. What I wrote is that ETS does NOT have to rely on words that are obscure to the Joe Six Pack crowd to make the test eminently more difficult. And this is an argument I have often made in discussions about the need to study stacks of flashcards or slave over the (utterly) silly lists produced by the likes of Barron’s. </p>
<p>For the record, speaking about difficulty of words, I never considered that the inclusion of those “silly” SAT words had much of an impact on the final score, and especially not for anyone who invested sufficient time in learning how to approach the test. In so many words, students who invested 1/10th of the time devoted to mindlessly study a bunch of words in proactive practices would have scored better. </p>
<p>The entire discussion about the lesser importance of those words is really moot, IMHO, as such words were never critical. For many, the analogy (and the old antonyms) part were the low hanging fruit as opposed to the more challenging reading comprehension sections. </p>
<p>By the way, an example of my argument follows: Is the word “bowdlerized” more difficult or easier than “blue-penciled?” The first one is obviously more obscure than a combination of blue and pencil, but is it really harder? I believe that the second one has just as many changes to trip the regular SAT taker than the first reference to Shakspeare! </p>
<p>"I never considered that the inclusion of those “silly” SAT words had much of an impact on the final score, and especially not for anyone who invested sufficient time in learning how to approach the test. "</p>
<p>My experience teaching the SAT over the last 15 years suggests that vocabulary plays a big role in the CR score, especially at the upper end. I’ve worked with a big national company as well as independently. When kids come in without that vocab, the 700+ scores rarely happen, no matter how much test strategy the teacher imparts.</p>
<p>“For many, the analogy (and the old antonyms) part were the low hanging fruit as opposed to the more challenging reading comprehension sections.”</p>
<p>Are you involved with SAT tutoring, or other types of cognitive and intellectual testing? What’s the basis for your statements about “many” students and what constituted low-hanging fruit for students besides yourself? My experience has been exactly the opposite: kids who didn’t grasp the old verbal sections right away had an uphill climb to move their scores at all.</p>
<p>It sounds like you’ve got a better mousetrap than the rest of the test prep industry. If you’re right, you should be making millions.</p>
<p>Hanna, pay closer attention to what I have written above, and leave the straw men arguments at the door. I have left enough footprints on this site that I do not have to dwell on my experience. Suffice it to say that I have the professional data to back up what I write about “most students” and the correlation with … obscure and silly SAT words a la Barron’s list. </p>
<p>And, fwiw, do NOT equate being armed with a decent vocabulary to studying 3500 or 5000 words, especially when lacking the textual context. Asking students to spend much time slaving over such lists is the domain of the lazy tutor or cheap software or misleading books. </p>
<p>This discussion has little to do with the mastery of vocabulary, which may come from sources totally distant from the SAT itself. Avid readers or students who learned classic languages might find the challenging words quite trivial. For the others, there are much better ways to increase the scores than to start reading lists like a robot. </p>
<p>The key is to maximize one’s efforts and time, and memorizing lists is simply one that offers an incredible poor ROI. To convince yourself, all you have to do is run the “hits” on the past 100 official administrations to understand how ineffective the existing list of words are. If learning the relevant vocabulary is important, there are better mechanisms to pick up such words through proactive practices and patterns recognition. In the end, the losses DIRECTLY related to not knowing certain words is a LOT smaller than many seem to think. I have gone through the validation process many times over the past 12 years, and it is what it is! Perhaps we have not been looking at the same data or used the same tools! </p>
<p>An above average vocabulary helps earning a good score on the SAT, but one can overcome some deficiencies. On the other hand, a wonderful vocabulary coupled with deficient reasoning and analytical abilities is much harder to deal with. And that is why increasing a verbal score remains so hard for the average student. </p>
<p>But there is a way to settle this. Why don’t you tell us what you consider an essential list of words and then we compare it to an officially released test. My task will be to show how little relevance the list had on one scorer and how he could have navigated the test. </p>
<p>“But there is a way to settle this. Why don’t you tell us what you consider an essential list of words and then we compare it to an officially released test.”</p>
<p>What? Who said there was some essential list of words? I never even claimed that studying word lists is useful – I have never used them with my students. Talk about a straw man. I said that I disagreed with your statements about “low-hanging fruit,” and I said that the vocabulary aspect of the SAT is very hard to prep for. I stand by that.</p>
<p>I don’t expect people to track my “footprints” on the site; if I have experience that’s relevant to a thread, I mention it.</p>
<p>I think you’re both right. The reading section is hardto prep for if you’re not much of a reader. If you have to prep in a short period, strategies will be more effective than word lists.</p>
<p>Well, Hanna, the text below is the one you RESPONDED to, and it was clearly about the silly words that appear on the usual lists of words. If we acces each other to use straw men arguments, we are clearly talking about parallel elements. </p>
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<p>I have to conclude that you either did not read my posts with sufficient attention or missed what. I was talking about. </p>
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<p>My son didn’t invest time in studying word lists to improve his score. He used the Xiggi Method., which was much more effective. :)</p>
<p>My daughter invested time in studying word lists. She felt it was the best use of her time. Even though she is an avid reader she had many gaps in her vocabulary of words which are used all the time in college-level reading material. She is a National Merit Scholar so it worked well enough for her, and I feel that having expanded her vocabulary will serve her so much better in college than if she had spent time focusing on “strategies” for taking a test she took once and never again. We have already seen that her comprehension of material has improved as she is recognizing those “SAT words” in things she reads even in high school. It is not hard to find other students on this site who felt that vocab was the most important thing for them to focus on. But everyone is different.</p>
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<p>Yes, everyone is different. And one of the differences might be to misunderstand what “strategies” really are. Learning to improve reading comprehension through correct techniques is not “relying” on bags of tricks. Logic dreasoning are skills that be acquired, even if rarely taught in our schools. Does one needs a “strategy” to learn the power of roots, suffixes, and prefixes, or recognize that all the words in the question are not relevant to picking the … answer? Does one need a strategy to recognize that the answer to the CR questions are always found within the four corners of the document? </p>
<p>I’m sure there are kids who need to be explicitly taught those “strategies” and “reasoning skills”. Maybe it’s not obvious to some kids that the answer to a reading comprehension question is in the reading passage. But some kids don’t need someone to tell them stuff like that.</p>
<p>My kids learned most of those strategies in elementary school. Latin helped with roots. Being avid readers took care of the rest. I’ve never thought the vocabulary on the SAT was too hard. I see no particular advantage in using the secondary meanings of familiar words, and IMO it just increases the trickiness of the SAT where you have to be careful that you are actually answering the question they are asking not the one you think they are asking. Most of the mistakes my kids made were from misreading questions - especially in the math section.</p>