You paid attention during 100% of high school!
85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don’t get scores that high! Good show, old chap!
Category Archives: feat of knowledge
stuff i do to test how smart i am
Words, Words, Words
Mamacita posted a list of 100 words the editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries believe all high school graduates should know. She bolded the 2 she had to look up. I am going to bold the ones I don’t know (19); italicize ones I have heard, but couldn’t use in a sentence (20); and leave plain the ones I am sure I could use correctly in a sentence (61).
Now that I have marked and counted I feel smarter than I did when I scanned through the list. I am by no means a vocabulary queen, but I no slouch either. Now I have 39 words to learn how to use correctly.
abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish *seen this one in Shakespeare
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany
equinox
euro
evanescent
expurgate
facetious
fatuous
feckless
fiduciary
filibuster
gamete
gauche
gerrymander
hegemony
hemoglobin
homogeneous
hubris
hypotenuse
impeach
incognito
incontrovertible
inculcate
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
jejune
kinetic
kowtow
laissez faire
lexicon
loquacious
lugubrious
metamorphosis
mitosis
moiety*seen this one in Shakespeare
nanotechnology
nihilism
nomenclature
nonsectarian
notarize
obsequious
oligarchy
omnipotent
orthography
oxidize
parabola
paradigm
parameter
pecuniary
photosynthesis
plagiarize
plasma
polymer
precipitous
quasar
quotidian
recapitulate
reciprocal
reparation
respiration
sanguine
soliloquy
subjugate
suffragist
supercilious
tautology
taxonomy
tectonic
tempestuous
thermodynamics
totalitarian
unctuous
usurp
vacuous
vehement
vortex
winnow
wrought
xenophobe
yeoman
ziggurat
Best spelling mistake of the day
In second grade we are writing acrostic poems with our names (I wrote one too). The best of the day was the little girl who wrote this (different name to protect the Illiterate):
Buttflies
Energetic
Thankful
Happy
Movie Madness Round 1B
I didn’t do as well in this second half of Round 1. I only got 9 of this set of 16 for a grand total of 22. I didn’t do the best or the worst, but I am not going to come close to winning as several of my second and third round choices are out of the running.
By choosing N x NW and Rear Window, I am losing out in at least two matches in each of the next 3 rounds. All About Eve is my choice for matches in the next 2 rounds. Oh well.
Movie Madness Round 1A
Godard and Kurosawa Regions Round 1 results are in. So far, the higher seeds have been victorious (except Mr. Smith, who got blasted by The Deer Hunter).How you doing so far?
I got 13 of the 16 matchups.
Movie Madness Picks
The deadline to entry was 5:00 ET and my email was postmarked 4:57! I haven’t seen a lot of the movies (I was in such a hurry I didn’t count), so I picked based on what I know about them.
Movie Madness
Paula atUltrablog commented here today! So I swung by to read her latest post (it hasn’t appeared in my Bloglines yet). She is participating in March Movie Madness (through Boiled Dinner). So here is me, being a joiner.
My picks will be posted here as soon as I have finished.
Name the states
I named them all, can you?
Occasionally during downtime on a particularly slow photo shoot, I’ve played this game with my assistants. Everyone takes out a piece of paper, and numbers it from 1 to 50. Then you get 10 minutes to write down every state you can remember. Finally, you compare it to the master list and see who got the most answers. 10 minutes seems like more than enough time to remember a list of 50 items, right? And yet somehow I’ve never managed to get more than 48 of them. ~Ironic Sans
Ironic Sans put up the challenge and I took it. I got the last one (duh!) with 1:03 to spare. I even challenged my husband. Right now he is at 9 with 5:45 left. I think it took me 3 minutes to get the last 2. How well will you do?
Edit: He missed three!