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Oct. 19th, 2007 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickBusy day scheduled for tomorrow. For tonight, a fun little time waster that I know you'll all enjoy.
Vocabulary testing, actually. It's online! It's multiple-choice! It's got some *damn* nice words in it. Go here: www.freerice.com and play a bit -- it takes a while to settle into a score for you. It only goes to 50, so if you get there, this is me doffing my cap in yer honor. I can *get* to 50, sometimes, but I damn sure can't *stay* there. Fifty is seriously fucking hard. (Allegedly it gives rice to the poor for you playing. What-evah.)
The game uses a teaching structure of 1-wrong drops you a level, 3 right in a row raises you a level. This adaptive thing is to keep you where it's *hard* to play so that you learn more. I'm not sure that knowing a one-word definition of a word is really "learning" the word -- words are not the same as other, different words or there would not be two words that were different and yet meant the self-same thing. Because the words are different, there are different meanings, even if you don't currently appreciate the subtleties involved. (As an FYI, I think the thesaurus is an overrated piece of "reference" material. You can almost always tell when someone is using thesaurus words in his or her writing because the words stick out. They're just *wrong* for matching with the rest of the piece. They don't match the level of diction elsewhere, they frequently don't match in tone. I hate how thesauri treat words like they are some sort of plug-n-play item.)
Example from the freerice.com game, level 48: Augean means filthy. Well, yeah. However, it's not a word for everybody. When you're sayin' Man, that hostel was freaking augean, both you and the listeners have to know about the seven labors of Hercules and the Augean stables and the routing of the river through to wash out the shit that the, er, cattle (I think it was cattle) were up to their eyeballs in. Augean is NOT a word you use for normal people because (a) you look like you're being smart, which is a fucking mortal sin (not a venial one, and venial is on the list in the mid-forties, too) in these parts and (b) they won't understand you anyway and (c) then you have to 'splain about Hercules and the labors and the stables and people start thinking that stuffing you headfirst into a toilet for some swirly goodness is a swell idea, one with some real merit. Augean is a word for using amongst people whom you are reasonably sure are going to cross-check in their own capacious brains and come up with the appropriate myffic goodness all on their own and be happily smug with themselves for knowing it, like you are, and there will be Robin Goodfellowship all 'round the table plus half a pint of shandy for me mam. It's that kind of word.
Half or more of your wordly (Not worldly. If I'd meant worldly, I'd've said worldly.) happiness comes from being able to tell when you're talking to people who want to hear about augean hostels AND being able to tell when you're talking to people who want to hear about fucking skanky gross hostels. Unlike what I thought when I was a neophyte user-of-words, it is NOT Best Practice to use the most-appropriate word you own in all cases and let the devil take the hindmost, the slower-of-thinking, and the people whose mouths would be better suited to catching flies. You are not going to be the rising tide that lifts all boats, so give up on that toot sweet, sunshine. The Best Practice is always to speak so that your audience will understand you without feeling fucking stupid. I spent approximately half of grade school learning how to talk to my peers and I'm giving this information away gratis to you, my faithful readers, who probably already know how to talk to the flesh people anyway. *sigh* Oh, well. Free advice is always worth at least as much as you pay for it, innat right?
Vocabulary testing, actually. It's online! It's multiple-choice! It's got some *damn* nice words in it. Go here: www.freerice.com and play a bit -- it takes a while to settle into a score for you. It only goes to 50, so if you get there, this is me doffing my cap in yer honor. I can *get* to 50, sometimes, but I damn sure can't *stay* there. Fifty is seriously fucking hard. (Allegedly it gives rice to the poor for you playing. What-evah.)
The game uses a teaching structure of 1-wrong drops you a level, 3 right in a row raises you a level. This adaptive thing is to keep you where it's *hard* to play so that you learn more. I'm not sure that knowing a one-word definition of a word is really "learning" the word -- words are not the same as other, different words or there would not be two words that were different and yet meant the self-same thing. Because the words are different, there are different meanings, even if you don't currently appreciate the subtleties involved. (As an FYI, I think the thesaurus is an overrated piece of "reference" material. You can almost always tell when someone is using thesaurus words in his or her writing because the words stick out. They're just *wrong* for matching with the rest of the piece. They don't match the level of diction elsewhere, they frequently don't match in tone. I hate how thesauri treat words like they are some sort of plug-n-play item.)
Example from the freerice.com game, level 48: Augean means filthy. Well, yeah. However, it's not a word for everybody. When you're sayin' Man, that hostel was freaking augean, both you and the listeners have to know about the seven labors of Hercules and the Augean stables and the routing of the river through to wash out the shit that the, er, cattle (I think it was cattle) were up to their eyeballs in. Augean is NOT a word you use for normal people because (a) you look like you're being smart, which is a fucking mortal sin (not a venial one, and venial is on the list in the mid-forties, too) in these parts and (b) they won't understand you anyway and (c) then you have to 'splain about Hercules and the labors and the stables and people start thinking that stuffing you headfirst into a toilet for some swirly goodness is a swell idea, one with some real merit. Augean is a word for using amongst people whom you are reasonably sure are going to cross-check in their own capacious brains and come up with the appropriate myffic goodness all on their own and be happily smug with themselves for knowing it, like you are, and there will be Robin Goodfellowship all 'round the table plus half a pint of shandy for me mam. It's that kind of word.
Half or more of your wordly (Not worldly. If I'd meant worldly, I'd've said worldly.) happiness comes from being able to tell when you're talking to people who want to hear about augean hostels AND being able to tell when you're talking to people who want to hear about fucking skanky gross hostels. Unlike what I thought when I was a neophyte user-of-words, it is NOT Best Practice to use the most-appropriate word you own in all cases and let the devil take the hindmost, the slower-of-thinking, and the people whose mouths would be better suited to catching flies. You are not going to be the rising tide that lifts all boats, so give up on that toot sweet, sunshine. The Best Practice is always to speak so that your audience will understand you without feeling fucking stupid. I spent approximately half of grade school learning how to talk to my peers and I'm giving this information away gratis to you, my faithful readers, who probably already know how to talk to the flesh people anyway. *sigh* Oh, well. Free advice is always worth at least as much as you pay for it, innat right?
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 12:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-20 01:13 pm (UTC)