<p>Do you guys really know these words? I just know some of them, like <10%... I feel diffident.</p>
<p>(finish question)
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I can't speak for others, but I really knew about 90% of the vocab that was posted on this thread. Every vocab word that I've posted as a challenge to others was a word I knew the meaning of off the top of my head; I did not search for them. Some of the words I've answered for others I have looked up in the dictionary, but the vast majority I knew by heart.</p>
<p>Don't feel "diffident" (good vocab word, BTW ;-) Anyone can pick up vocab just by reading with a dictionary. I learned almost all my vocab by reading my AP English Lit books with a dictionary next to me... anytime I saw a word I didn't know the meaning of, I looked it up. I learned like 100 words just by reading Jane Eyre.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I can't speak for others, but I really knew about 90% of the vocab that was posted on this thread. Every vocab word that I've posted as a challenge to others was a word I knew the meaning of off the top of my head; I did not search for them. Some of the words I've answered for others I have looked up in the dictionary, but the vast majority I knew by heart.</p>
<p>Don't feel "diffident" (good vocab word, BTW ;-) Anyone can pick up vocab just by reading with a dictionary. I learned almost all my vocab by reading my AP English Lit books with a dictionary next to me... anytime I saw a word I didn't know the meaning of, I looked it up. I learned like 100 words just by reading Jane Eyre.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>No wonder. "diffident" is one of the word I know, before I read this thread. But this is a really good idea for us to know more vocab!
Ah... I'm just in Freshman English... Hhahaaa.
I'm an international student though... kind of.</p>
<p>This was a question that came up on the first page of posts (April 14), and it's one of those questions that don't have a really satisfying answer until you go back to the Latin roots. PLEBEIAN comes from "plebs," a Latin word meaning the lower political class in Roman society or meaning, more generally, the common people. VULGAR comes from "vulgus," a Latin word also meaning the common people or the masses. The two words have lived parallel lives. Somebody (maybe a super-refined, super-cultured member of the nobility) thought that the common people were always the ones flipping the bird, belching in public, going wild over potty jokes, and so on, with the result that VULGAR came to mean not just "related to the common people" but also "crude, offensive, in bad taste." And PLEBEIAN went through a similar evolution. The only difference is that when you look up the two words, the first meaning for VULGAR is likely to be "crude" and the second to be "common, relating to the common people", while the order of meanings is typically just the opposite when you look up PLEBEIAN. But both words have both meanings.</p>
<p>**Ab ovo<a href="Latin:%20from%20the%20egg">/b</a> - is a reference to one of the twin eggs of Leda and Zeus disguised as a swan from which Helen was born. Had Leda not laid the egg, Helen would not have been born, so Paris could not have eloped with her, so there would have been no Trojan War etc. </p>
<p>Hmm...</p>
<p>For the test, the teacher made us remember specifics from Greek literature. Luckily, I recalled a few Latin root derivatives from my years in Latin IV AP, ab = from, ovo = eggs. I guess I could remember it as, "From the Eggs," in context with Zeus and the birth of Helen.</p>
<p>New word:</p>
<p>*Achromatic *</p>
<p>I walked into the room, and it gave me the impression of being very achromatic, with everything being so white and plain!</p>