The show Glee has recently resurrected this 1999 Destiny’s Child hit:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-RwDJdOauI

Did you notice the GRE word audacity?

And now you ask to use my car
Drive it all day and don’t fill up the tank
And you have the audacity
To even come and step to me
And ask to hold some money from me
Until you get your check next week

Audacity means “boldness or daring, especially with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.” That is, audacity can be good or bad, depending on the context and on one’s perspective. Here, the man in question has “arrogant disregard” for politeness, reciprocity, and the conventions of romantic relationships, as seen by the speaker.

The speaker also calls her paramour a “trifling, good for nothing type of brother.” Another word for trifling is nugatory, “of no real value; trifling; worthless.”

It also seems that the hapless lover is guilty of cadging. To cadge is to obtain by imposing on another’s generosity or friendship, borrow without intent to repay, or beg or obtain by begging.

You’re slowly making me pay for things
Your money should be handling.

Sounds manipulative! It seems like this guy is a champion cadger, and that his answer to the question “Can you pay my automo’bills?” is certain to be an unsatisfying one.

The Bruzowski Company’s competitor to the iPad, the $uperKoolTablet, isn’t ___________, let alone ubiquitous.

WIthout knowledge of the idiom “Not X, let alone Y” (as well as the word ubiquitous), many people would have a hard time filling in the blank in the sentence above.

This idiom is also precisely the sort of thing that leads people to not quite understand what they’re reading in Reading Comp. Many students say to themselves, “Why is the word alone in this sentence?”, but then they’re not sure what to look up, so they just let it go … and possibly miss a question.

“Not X, let alone Y” “ Not X and definitely not this even more extreme thing, Y.

For instance:

Our remaining funds are not enough to get us through the week, let alone enough to pay next month’s payroll.

In this sentence, getting through the week is less expensive than next month’s payroll, so if we can’t afford the cheaper thing, we definitely can’t afford the more expensive thing.

In the sentence about the $uperKoolTablet, the word in the blank should be a lesser form of ubiquitous (existing everywhere). Thus, a good fill-in for the blank would be “popular” or “widely available.”

The expressions “not to mention” and “much less” can be used in the same way:

I signed up for this GRE class because I have no memory of ever learning geometry, not to mention quadratic equations.

You let that man give you mouth-to-mouth after you ran out of breath at the pool? That guy doesn’t even know CPR, much less is he a “world class doctor.” He just likes to hang out at the pool and offer people mouth-to-mouth.

“Origin story” is an expression for a superhero’s backstory — for instance, Superman was born on Krypton just before it was destroyed. Many words also have fascinating origin stories. While English comes largely from Latin (and from Greek, and from Latin through French and Spanish, with some Germanic roots and a bit of Sanskrit, etc.), you’ll find that word usage can change quite bit over a couple thousand years.

Fractious sounds a lot like “fraction,” doesn’t it? It actually means “Unruly, troublemaking, quarrelsome,” or simply “irritable.”

There’s a good reason the fractious sounds a bit mathematical. The word fraction once meant brawling or discord (as in, “A fraction broke out outside the pub”) -“ even today, a fraction (in math) is something that has been broken up.

Don’t confuse fractious with factious, meaning affected by party strife, breaking into factions or cliques within a larger organization. (Actually, those two words are pretty similar, so if you confused them, it wouldn’t really be the end of the world. A factious group could easily become fractious.)

The Students for Progressive Action were a fractious bunch, always fighting with one another over exactly which progressive action should take priority.

Related Words:
Obstreperous – unruly, noisy
Refractory – stubbornly disobedient
Captious – faultfinding, making a big deal of trivial faults

Also, the GRE classics belligerent, bellicose, and pugnacious all mean “combative, quarrelsome, given to fighting.”

A prodigy is an extraordinarily talented person, especially a child genius. For instance, Doogie Howser, of the TV show, “Doogie Howser, M.D.”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBjch7P_gF8

Prodigal is an adjective meaning “wastefully or recklessly extravagant,” or a noun meaning “a wasteful person.” This is Rembrandt’s painting “Return of the Prodigal Son,” based on a story from the Bible.

The guy on his knees is the prodigal one, but in the painting, he’s not being prodigal — he’s repenting for being prodigal.

The pith of the story is this: A man has two sons. Younger son: “Hey Dad, I know you’re not dead yet, but can I have my inheritance now anyway?” The munificent father gives the son the money, and the son goes off and spends it on wine and women, that sort of thing (what a libertine!) Then, famine strikes! The son becomes desperately poor and has to herd pigs. When it gets really bad, he decides to go back home and beg for a job as his father’s servant. But before the son can even ask, the father is already kissing him and having the servants dress him in fine robes and “kill the fatted calf” for a celebration. The older, obedient, non-prodigal son gets kind of pissed — nobody’s throwing a party for him, so why are they throwing a party for his jerk brother? We’ll leave aside the religious lesson (hint: the Dad is like God!), but the prodigal part is the younger son wasting all his money.

In sum, prodigal and prodigy are not at all the same thing! If I hear one more person tell me that prodigal means “genius,” I will be filled with a prodigious indignation!

Oh, I almost forgot. Prodigious isn’t the same as prodigy or prodigal — it just means “large.”