A Pleasure in Words

Below are questions taken from Mr. Himwich’s vocabulary tests given to juniors over the past semester. See how you would fare. 

1. What word has hypnos, eros, and machia for its roots and what does that word mean?
2. What is the pejorative etymology of nice?
3. What did psyche mean before it meant soul?
4. What is praeterition?
5. What is an apotropaic device used for?
6. Etymologically speaking, how long does something ephemeral last?
7. What is meretricious beauty?
8. What of the following does not derive from the same root as the others: moral, mores, moratorium, morale?
9. Which of the following is always pejorative in meaning: atheist, desultory, trenchant, amoral, invidious?
10. What is a speaker doing when he enters upon his peroration?
11. What part of what animal is referred to in the etymology of cynosure?
12. What is a Socratic apology?
13. What is the etymological meaning of the word person?
14. What are crepuscular creatures?
15. What figure of speech is “I am not unwell”?
16. What poet gave us the phrases objective correlative and dissociation of sensibility?
17. What is the defining quality of a carbuncular youth?
18. What does the italicized mean in the following quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? “Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the expression ‘madman’ as he bent over Wilson’s body that afternoon, and the adventitious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper reports next day.”
19. Distinguish in meaning sensuous and sensual?
20. What is wrong with the phrase unpredictable vicissitude?

Answers: 

1. hypnerotomachia: the struggle for love through dreaming. This is the title of one of the first books to be printed in the late 15^th century. 
2. nice derives from Latin nescire: not to know — originally referred to someone naïve or ignorant.
3. psyche originally meant breath in ancient Greek. 
4. praeterition or preterition is a rhetorical strategy by which the speaker pretends to omit saying what he does in fact say, e.g. “I will not tell you where I saw your daughter last night about 3:00 near the old, abandoned chocolate factory?”
5. An apotropaic device is used for warding off evil, especially the evil eye of envy.
6. Something ephemeral etymological lasts but a single day. 
7. Meretricious beauty is tawdry, cheap, characteristic of a prostitute (Latin meretrix: prostitute). 
8. Moratorum derives from Latin mora: delay; all the others derive from Latin mos: custom. 
9. Invidious is the only one that is always pejorative. 
10. Peroration is the conclusion of a speech.
11. Cynosure etymologically refers to a dog’s tail. 
12. A Socratic apology is a vigorous defense. 
13. Person derives from Latin persona: mask. 
14. Crepuscular creatures become active at dusk. 
15. Litotes. 
16. T.S. Eliot
17. A carbuncular youth has acne. 
18. Adventitious means not belonging intrinsically, something out of keeping with a situation.
19. Sensuous means ‘appealing to the senses’: sensual ‘relating to gratification of the sexual appetite’.
20. Unpredictable vicissitude is repetitiously redundant.