| Your Vocabulary Score: A+ |
 Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person. |
Only thing is, I found this on someone's blog who had gotten a B+, and the wording said "Don’t fret that you didn’t get every word right, your vocabulary can be easily ameliorated!"
Ameliorated didn't look right to me. Yes it means to make better, but I thought only in a specific way, as in, to improve from dreadful to not-quite-so bad. So either the quiz writer does know more vocabulary than me, or is being snide or is a poser.
5 comments:
I'd vote for poser. And I got the same score as you. Separated at birth? ;-)
I think their use of "ameliorate" is fine -- the way they used "multifarious" grated on me, though. Multifarious means "having or occurring in great variety: diverse." To my mind, their sentence implies that you have many vocabularies, rather than that your vocabulary contains many words.
Helen
I've never heard of ameliorating anything other than a problem. I'm with you that ameliorating a vocabulary sounds wrong.
Helen, I didn't like "multifarious" either, but I wasn't sure my dislike had merit.
Since multifarious is a synonym for 'manifold' and manifold also has a mathematical technical meaning, some math geeks that I used to hang out with would be silly and call their manifolds multifarious. Years ago, but it still makes me uneasy to use the word.
"It was on analytic and algebraic topology of infinitely differentiable Riemannian manifolds. Bozhe moi! This, I know from nothing! But I think of great Lobachevsky and I get idea, ha-ha! I have a friend in Minsk..."
That's everything this English major knows about mathematical manifolds.
Franz is right, now that I think about it: ameliorate isn't just a synonym for "improve." You could ameliorate a poor score, but it's a bit off to say you could ameliorate the vocabulary.
Helen
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