1. The Harry Potter Book 7 actually made use of a couple of the twenty-five cent words, including a personal favorite, "perfidy"(= treachery, disloyalty, benedict-arnold-pastime). Then again, the book also made use of terms like "snog," "Adava Kedavra," "effing" and "BITCH!," so I don't know how much reading Potter alongside my GRE Book actually helped.
2. Other books I've read in the past three weeks (Emperor's Children, The Keep, as well as online reviews of those two books) threw a lot of the vocab words around like nobody's business, betraying a thesaurus-addiction like needle-tracks:heroin. Fatuous, mollify, perfidy (again), surreptitious, obviate, Sitwellian, bonhomie, and my personal favorite "avuncular" ("like an uncle" - like a forklift lifting a crate of forks, so damn literal!) reared their heads way more often than the pretext of a urbane, Manhattan sophisticate narrative really necessitated. But the real point is that it's surprising how many ridiculous words you know that you aren't aware of and/or are adept at construing their meaning from context without blinking an eye and not even noticing that you just ran over a BIG WORD - but when you're studying vocab all the time, the words fly out and make you question why the hell the author keeps saying "visage" and "countenance" instead of "face."
3. You also quickly figure out that there's an obsessive theme to the the words that you need to learn for GRE-type purposes. They are obsessed with concepts of frugality (abstemious, parsimonious, provident, skinflint, miserly, niggardly, etc.) and wastefulness (prodigal, profligate, spendthrift, immoderate, wanton), longwindedness (loquacious, garrulous, discursive, verbose, voluble) and conciseness (laconic, reticent, taciturn, pithy, sententious). There are tons of other dichotomies that drove me nuts because I felt like I was learning four hundred ways to say the same two things (and yes, i know there are subtleties, but occasionally I would find circles in the GRE book - for example, to admonish is to reprove, to reprove is to reprimand, to reprimand is to rebuke and to rebuke is to admonish. I am not kidding; that is the exact circle that was in the Barron's book. Awesome. They also claimed immovable was "not movable" and movable was "not immovable." Somewhere in there is some serious Zen). The above and beyond winner, of course, is that I now know no fewer than eight ways off the top of my head to insinuate that someone is "stubborn" - intransigent, recalcitrant, refractory, obstinate, obdurate, inexorable, dogged, mulish, etc. Ridiculous.
4. This kind of single-mindedness invariably leads to nocturnal psychosis, at least on my part. I definitely woke up at 3 AM one night with an entirely anti-beneficial obsessive need to remember what the difference between petulant and impetuous was. (Petulant = peevy, touchy, impetuous = violent, e.g. Mike Tyson is a petulant dude whose style is, by all accounts, impetuous, his defense impregnable, he's going to eat your children, etc.). I had similar night-time idiocy back when beck and I were taking chemistry over the summer at Tufts; in fact, that much chemistry packed into the day made me do things like look at "No Parking" signs and start thinking about Nitrous Oxide. That was a bad scene.
5. I also got to employ my idiotic mnemonic device arsenal, which largely involves imagining narratives to help me remember words (lassitude = little lass falling asleep, assiduous = a donkey working diligently). But sometimes it helps to remember really stupid, over the top thing, like a kick-ass veteran ninja pug dog, who will help you remember that pugnacious means "ready to fight" and that a pugilant is a boxer. These are things I will remember probably no longer than the next fifteen seconds, but they got the job done.
6. Indeed, they got the job done. Big-time self-aggrandizement: I got a 790 on my Verbal Reasoning and an 800 on the Quantitative Analysis (Math). Sweet. So whatever I decide to do in the GRAD (and not professional) school department will not have any doors closed by my GRE scores. Sweet relief. I was pretty uptight and nervous, self-doubting and diffident about the whole thing, so I'm glad it turned out well. And now, of course, I need to figure something out that will put it to good use.
SO on the plus side, you will start getting posts again. I will try to recap (short for recapitulate) the Phoenix events of late shortly, not that there has been anything groundbreaking recently. I do owe a ton of reviews, which I may or may not get around to. We'll see. But I'll leave you here with the following exchange that Beck had with a little (four year old?) boy at her clinic recently. A man and his son came in with their dog who was acutely not walking. Beck was trying to do a neuro exam on the pup, who was not taking it well and yelping a lot. The expression of pain apparently triggered something in the four year old's brain, because he chimed in:
"When I got my front privates stuck in my zipper, they put some cream on it that made it go numb."
Beck's colleague could not take it - way too funny - so she made up an excuse and left the room. Beck, consummate professional, did not acknowledge the outburst (nor did the dad), and Beck continued to examine the dog. But the boy was not satisfied, and suspected that Beck had not heard him:
"WHEN I GOT MY FRONT PRIVATES STUCK IN MY ZIPPER, THEY PUT SOME CREAM ON IT THAT MADE IT GO NUMB!"
Beck, quick on her feet: "Well, I bet you never did that again!"
Boy: "NO WAY!"
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