I got 173, which seems to be an uncommonly high score (even on this thread!), but I'm still gonna grumble about it. Many of those words were not English words, in the sense of even "commonly used loanwords" -- they were either pseudolatin scientific coinages, or specific technical loanwords. Not fair!
Why do Latin and Classical Greek get all the cachet for being languages that "intelligent" people learn? Why in hell would intelligent people mess around with dead languages anyway -- why not learn a living language, even if the language is only technically living?! (Yeah, I'm studying Hebrew, but I'm studying modern Hebrew.) It's the same sort of problem as hardly anyone will take you seriously as a "smart person" if you have an arts degree and don't play chess, and I'll go you best two falls out of three on standard IQ test scores any day!
Bias, bias, bias! I'd like to e-mail the developer of that test George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language", over and over again until he gets the idea about Latinate words...
At least they had "thewy." And I think one or two other semi-obsolete Germanic words. And I seem to recall a few things that looked Spanish. To leaven all the Greek and Latin. But that, unfortunately, is where the hard words almost all are in modern English, in the classical-derived vocabulary.
Culture bias much?
Why do Latin and Classical Greek get all the cachet for being languages that "intelligent" people learn? Why in hell would intelligent people mess around with dead languages anyway -- why not learn a living language, even if the language is only technically living?! (Yeah, I'm studying Hebrew, but I'm studying modern Hebrew.) It's the same sort of problem as hardly anyone will take you seriously as a "smart person" if you have an arts degree and don't play chess, and I'll go you best two falls out of three on standard IQ test scores any day!
Bias, bias, bias! I'd like to e-mail the developer of that test George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language", over and over again until he gets the idea about Latinate words...
Grumble...
Re: Culture bias much?
M