Words: Beware of the “Easy” Ones (they can be the trickiest)

The vocabulary aspect of the SAT remains my favorite part of this whole project. I’m referring here to both the “Vocabulary Section,” as well as the Critical Reading passages.

I never tire of learning new words, parsing words I already know, or being reminded of words I want to bring back into rotation. Take, for example, my list this week:

• inchoate
• recondite
• dirge
• mawkish

(All from actual SATs…Love.)

And while I can’t lay claim to knowing even close to all of the vocab on the SAT, I actually haven’t gotten any of the “vocab questions” wrong on test day (miraculously).   I probably just jinxed myself.

But here’s the weird, subtle, issue with the words on the SAT that I want to shed light on:

The simple words give me more trouble than the sophisticated ones because they often require a “dictionary definition,” while I’m thinking in vernacular terms.

Take, for example, the word “nonplussed.” I was sure it meant “unfazed,” (right?), and answered the question accordingly, without it even occurring to me that there was another, older (more proper?) definition.

I got the question wrong.

The College Board was looking for the “bewildered,” or “not sure how to respond” definition of the word.

I was relieved to discover that I was in good company about the meaning of this word:

Meghan Daum, writing in the Los Angeles Times, was disappointed by Barack Obama’s use of the “unfazed”sense of the word when he said of his daughters’ response to media scrutiny, “I’ve been really happy by how nonplussed they’ve been by the whole thing.”

Here are a few other words that might not mean what you think they mean:

• Irregardless is not the opposite of regardless.
• Peruse might surprise you as well (hint: it’s the opposite of how most people use it).
• And cynical doesn’t really mean pessimistic.

But here’s the example that should really drive this point home: The word “bug” — I bet you can’t imagine not knowing what it means, right?

Well try this on for size:

The good news is that there wasn’t even a question about the word. The bad news is that I perseverated over it’s meaning while reading the passage, and lost precious seconds. (Don’t you do that!)

Illustrations by Jennifer Orkin Lewis