Vocab blues

I have always been a bit of a snob when it comes to my English, even when I was in an ICSE school. Following that up with 4 years in CBSE didn't help to dispel that notion.

However, I was certainly forced too disabuse myself of any such ideas after coming to college. Here I found people who'd read Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto in Class 10th (if you havent heard of it, suffice it to say that it's a pretty big deal), then there were national level debate champions and so on.

I hope I don't sound toooo smug, but after 2 years of college, I have fared reasonably well even with all these new threats to my position. Now, it's time for the GRE.

The GRE is of course, not a particularly gruelling test, but it does require a certain degree of command over the English language. Moreover, I enjoy finding out new words, a past time you may or may not have experienced. The problem with using these abtruse words (now there's an example!) is that they make you sound all pedantic and anal....an image I'm not anxious to project in coll.

Anyway, I came across this site called freerice.com, and have spent an entertaining 2 days guessing completely into the dark. Here are some examples:
setaceous:
1. bristly, 2. lucky, 3. furious, 4. sexless
If you already know the meaning, you should really not read any further. There are only more words of a similar sort.
Now the meaning is of course not so important as the process, which is the fun part.
now do you call a lucky person,' he is setaceous in all he does'....or,
'he was setaceous when he got her letter'....or, 'Varun is setaceous when it comes to girls'....
the last one might be construed to have some meaning but only by a stretch, but the rest obviously don't sound right.
The answer is of course, bristly.
Another one is hyssop-is it a herb, or a monster. The answer here as well can be had by groping around with sentence...it turns out it is a herb
Now here's where my strategy failed- decorticate. How on earth did someone coin this word for peeling I don't know. In a sentence: "He was decorticating the banana". Even those snooty professors in Harvard wouldn't do that....but apparently someone does.

As I came across more and more weird words, I stumbled onto a site which specialises exclusively on weird words, and pretty interesting it was too.

For example, did you know of the word 'lollapaloosa'? Here's the history of the word:
"You can’t easily misunderstand the meaning of this American word, since it’s so obviously contains within its sounds the idea of something excellent or highly desirable, just right as the name for the annual Lollapalooza pop festival. It has been spelled just about every possible way down the years (the Oxford English Dictionary has it under lallapaloosa). Its extravagant enthusiasm may be judged from an early appearance, in Miss Minerva and William Green Hill by Frances Boyd Calhoun, dated 1909:
“Lordee, Lordee,” he gazed at them admiringly, “you sho’ is genoowine corn-fed, sterlin’ silver, all-wool-an’-a-yard-wide, pure-leaf, Green-River Lollapaloosas.”
Another early example is in a baseball game report in the Fort Wayne Sentinel of May 1903, one we may be glad to have missed (the reporter said disgustedly that one pitcher was all too accurate, since he hit the bat almost every time):
There wasn’t enough ginger in the players nor audience, either, to keep a colicky baby awake, the only excitement being furnished by a loquacious individual in the grand stand who was rooting for Evansville, and he rooted right, too. He proclaimed himself the High-past-potent-grand-mufti-lallapaloosa of the Amalgamated Knockers’ Brotherhood and had a bigger assortment of mallets on hand than a croquet factory.
That was one of its earliest appearances in print, since it seems to have been around in the language for only a few years by then. Other early usages suggest an origin among card players, such as in an 1899 report in the Daily Herald of Delphos, Ohio, about card sharps fleecing a hick: “Another got a lallapaloosa, consisting of three clubs and a pair of spades, and took $85 of the farmer’s money.” In 1897 the Idaho Daily Statesman had another: “‘A lalla-pa-loosa,’ answered big John, and threw his hand to Scovel. There was a jack of hearts and a deuce, tray, four and five of diamonds.”
Where it comes from is uncertain. Lulu and lolla, both also meaning something good, are recorded earlier, and lollapaloosa may be an extravagant outgrowth of the latter. Suggestions that it may derive from appaloosa, the name of the famous breed of Native American horse, are ruled out on grounds of date."

This is of course just one out of thousands. Imagine, a single word carrying an entire history with it. Etymology, as the science of studying words is called, is particularly fascinating, as you may might discover by just digging into the word roots of common words.