“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.

To bilk is to cheat or defraud.

The con artist bilked many elderly people out of their savings, promising to cure illnesses from diabetes to cancer with only 36 monthly payments of $99.99 “ for which the victims received nothing but useless placebo pills.

Hoodwink, Swindle, Con, and Fleece are all verbs for cheating others. Fleece is perhaps more severe, having the connotation of taking everything from the victim, the way one sheers all of the fleece from a sheep.

Bilk can also be a noun for the person who cheats others (I hope that bilk goes to jail!) More obscurely, bilk can mean to “escape from, frustrate, or thwart.”

The word comes from the card game cribbage, where it means to play a card that keeps an opponent from scoring. Cribbage is a card game that uses a board like the one below to keep score.

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.

“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.”

When I wrote this post about the word aerie, little did I know that Aerie was a store you could find in the mall! (I found one on a trip to Boston).

An aerie, of course, is “the nest of a bird of prey, as an eagle or a hawk” — or, metaphorically speaking, “a house, fortress, or the like, located high on a hill or mountain.” Aerie can also be spelled aery, eyrie, or eyry.

So, the store American Eagle seems to have opened up a lingerie shop called Aerie. You know … eagle … aerie? Makes sense, right? As in, if an eagle wanted to get amorous, it might say, “Hey baby, come on up to my aerie.”

This week’s meme has been a fatuous music video by previously unknown thirteen year old Rebecca Black. The video, “Friday,” has been called “the worst song ever written.” See for yourself!

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfVsfOSbJY0

Fatuous means “foolish or inane, especially in an unconscious, complacent manner; silly.”

Here is an excerpt from the lyrics:

7am, waking up in the morning
Gotta be fresh, gotta go downstairs
Gotta have my bowl, gotta have cereal

Wow, isn’t that inane? (Lacking sense, significance, or ideas?) I might also call it insipid (without distinctive, interesting, or stimulating qualities). Here’s more:

Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?

A lot of the insipidity or fatuity of the song has to do with the fact that the lyrics are so very mundane (or pedestrian). You have to have cereal before you go to the bus stop? Really? Is picking a seat in the car totally blowing your mind?

This song is so very bad that some might call it a travesty of modern pop music. A travesty is “a literary or artistic composition so inferior in quality as to be merely a grotesque imitation of its model.”

Yesterday was Thursday
Today it is Friday
We we we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes afterwards

Really? She tells us the days of the week? In chronological order? (Well, better than alphabetical order, I guess).

Because the song is so hilariously bad, it is spawned a number of parodies, or satirical imitations. Here is one lampoon of Black’s song:

Just when you thought nothing could get more fatuous, inane, insipid or vapid than “Tomorrow is Saturday / And Sunday comes afterwards,” this parody manages to lampoon those very utilitarian lyrics with, “Friday happens on Friday.”

PopEater recently ran this post about Charlie Sheen’s very public meltdown.

Notice the word turpitude. Turpitude means depravity, baseness of character, or corrupt or depraved acts. It is often used in the phrase moral turpitude, a legal term that describes depraved behavior.

Worried about her grandson’s turpitude “ as evinced by his constant detentions and a three-day stay in a juvenile jail “ Mrs. Worthington offered to pay for military school.

It’s hard to fathom the kind of turpitude required to make a movie that could get banned in modern-day Europe! When I read the screenplay, I nearly threw up.

Three related words are:

Base – morally low, mean, dishonorable; of little or no value; crude and unrefined; counterfeit

Debase – lower or reduce in quality or dignity

…and, of course, depraved, meaning morally bad, corrupt, or perverted.

Now, take a look at the use of turpitude in the Sheen article:

Do you spot the problem?

Turpitude is a bad thing. Sheen certainly wasn’t fired for a lack of it — he was fired for turpitude itself. Perhaps we could say he was fired for a surfeit of turpitude.

Anyone want to start a band called Surfeit of Turpitude?

“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.

A toady is someone who flatters or acts in a servile manner for self-serving reasons.

Look at that toady, sucking up and offering to do the boss’s Christmas shopping for his kids. Gross.

Lackey, Sycophant, and Myrmidon are synonyms.

Fawn means to try to please in a submissive way.

Obsequious means servile, very compliant, fawning.

Truckle means to act subserviently.

Toady comes from toad-eater, after magicians’ assistants who would supposedly eat poisonous toads so the magician could show off his ability to magically expel the poison. Toadeat used to mean do any degrading thing for your boss, but today you can use toady as a verb (or toady up to someone) for this purpose.

I thought this was pretty excellent. Notice how my mom wasn’t sure about how to use the word, so she “looked up examples of this word’s use in a sentence”? What an excellent strategy!

This recent article from the UK’s Daily Mail contained several GRE-appropriate vocabulary words.

Plaudits (always plural) means an enthusiastic expression of approval. The word shares a root with applaud, laud, and laudation, and is used similarly to the (also plural) kudos.

Gilded means “covered or highlighted with gold or something of a golden color,” or “having a pleasing or showy appearance that conceals something of little worth.”

You probably remember the “Gilded Age” from U.S. History, a time in which the upper class lived opulent lifestyles and gave lavishly to philanthropic causes, but also a time in which a class divide was growing and labor unrest was brewing. From Wikipedia:

The term “Gilded Age” was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. The name refers to the process of gilding an object with a superficial layer of gold and is meant to make fun of ostentatious display while playing on the term “golden age.”

A common expression is “to gild the lily”, which means “to add unnecessary ornamentation, a special feature, etc., in an attempt to improve something that is already complete, satisfactory, or ideal.” After all, if you’ve already got a beautiful flower, why would you try to gold-plate it?

Today I graduated with my masters and also got engaged! It’s the best day of my life! Baking me a celebratory cake would just be gilding the lily.

Don’t confuse gild with guild, a medieval trade organization or any organization of people with related interests, goals, etc.

A Sylph is a slender, graceful woman or girl. No surprise there, right? Oh, here’s definition #2: “(in folklore) one of a race of supernatural beings supposed to inhabit the air.”

They’re so thin they EAT AIR! Okay, not exactly. From Dictionary.com, credited to Random House:

Sylph, salamander, undine ( nymph ), gnome were imaginary beings inhabiting the four elements once believed to make up the physical world. All except the gnomes were female. Sylphs dwelt in the air and were light, dainty, and airy beings. Salamanders dwelt in fire: a salamander that lives in the midst of flames (Addison). Undines were water spirits: By marrying a man, an undine could acquire a mortal soul. (They were also called nymphs, though nymphs were ordinarily minor divinities of nature who dwelt in woods, hills, and meadows as well as in waters.) Gnomes were little old men or dwarfs, dwelling in the earth: ugly enough to be king of the gnomes.

That’s pretty incredible. I think I’ve seen a few gnome/sylph romances among the rich and famous.