Manhattan Prep GRE Blog

Vocab in the Classics: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Part III

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Welcome to Vocab in the Classics. In our final post about The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, we look at selections from Washington Irving’s short story.

He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together.

In cold weather he was distinguished by a fur cap, surmounted with a flaunting fox’s tail; and when the folks at a country gathering descried this well-known crest at a distance, whisking about among a squad of hard riders, they always stood by for a squall.

He was satisfied with his wealth, but not proud of it; and piqued himself upon the hearty abundance, rather than the style in which he lived.

That he might make his appearance before his mistress in the true style of a cavalier, he borrowed a horse from the farmer with whom he was domiciliated, a choleric old Dutchman of the name of Hans Van Ripper, and, thus gallantly mounted, issued forth like a knight-errant in quest of adventures.

There was something in the moody and dogged silence of this pertinacious companion that was mysterious and appalling.

Ichabod Crane was famously portrayed by Johnny Depp in the 1999 film, Sleepy Hollow, although it’s clear from the description above that Depp is substantially more handsome and less ridiculous than Crane was meant to be.

Read the original story here.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kOK5HMdo_E

Vocab in the Classics: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Part II

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Welcome to Vocab in the Classics. Here we look at selections from Washington Irving’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Today we learn more about Ichabod Crane, protagonist of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

His appearance, therefore, is apt to occasion some little stir at the tea-table of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish of cakes or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver teapot…. From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of travelling gazette, carrying the whole budget of local gossip from house to house, so that his appearance was always greeted with satisfaction. He was, moreover, esteemed by the women as a man of great erudition, for he had read several books quite through, and was a perfect master of Cotton Mather’s “History of New England Witchcraft,” in which, by the way, he most firmly and potently believed.

Manhattan GRE’s blog is written by one of our real-live GRE instructors. She teaches in New York. To learn about Manhattan GRE’s classes, go here. To suggest a word or topic for the blog, email jenniferd@manhattangmat.com. Thanks to adult spelling bee champ David Riddle for suggesting and providing content for this post.

Vocab in the Classics: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

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Welcome to Vocab in the Classics. Here we look at selections from Washington Irving’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Now, let us meet Ichabod Crane, the protagonist of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

There was something extremely provoking in this obstinately pacific system; it left Brom no alternative but to draw upon the funds of rustic waggery in his disposition, and to play off boorish practical jokes upon his rival. Ichabod became the object of whimsical persecution to Bones and his gang of rough riders. They harried his hitherto peaceful domains; smoked out his singing school by stopping up the chimney; broke into the schoolhouse at night… and turned everything topsy-turvy, so that the poor schoolmaster began to think all the witches in the country held their meetings there.

Choose your own answer to this GRE Antonyms question before clicking “more”:

BOORISH:
A. exciting
B. conversant
C. inept
D. decorous
E. magniloquent

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A Plethora of Words for a Plethora

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English has a lot of words for a lot.

Hmmn. How else could I say that sentence?

Of course, no mention of “plethora” on a vocabulary blog could go unaccompanied by this clip from the 1986 Steve Martin classic, ¡Three Amigos!, which famously coined the phrase “a plethora of piñatas.”

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IYDNymkUZc

Greek Deities: Vocab in Harry Potter

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Although there is undoubtedly more esoterica to unearth, this will be our final post on characters from Harry Potter. (Although we do have another post coming on magic spells in Harry Potter).

owlHermes the Owl is, of course, named after the Greek god Hermes, who gives us the word hermetic, as in “hermetically sealed.” This might seem a bit weird until you realize that Hermes was not only the god of commerce, invention, cunning, and theft, but also the god of alchemy, which undoubtedly required sealing things in jars. Hermes was called Mercury by the Romans, hence the word mercurial.

Apollyon Pringle (“caretaker at Hogwarts before Argus Filch”) takes his name from the Greek god Apollo, who gives us apollonian — “calm, ordered, rational, balanced.”

Of course, that word might remind you of Apollonia from Prince’s Purple Rain; interestingly, the name Apollonia was suggested by Prince for the actress based on the character Apollonia Vitelli-Corleone from The Godfather. And somehow, we can trace all that back to Apollo.

Visual Dictionary: Cog

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Welcome to Visual Dictionary, a series of posts about words that are better expressed in pictures.

This is a cog. It is a small gearwheel.

Actually, the little teeth (“tenons”) coming out of it are called cogs, and the whole thing is can be called a cogwheel, but when most people say cog, especially in a metaphorical way, they mean the whole thing, the cogwheel.

In a literal sense, a cog or cogwheel “transmits successive motive force to a corresponding wheel or gear.” Usually, a lot of cogs work together, such as in this clockworks:

Metaphorically speaking, a cog is a person in a company or organization who does very routine tasks. If you’re a cog, you might be doing necessary work, but you might feel as though anyone could do your job, and as though you are not very significant. No one wants to be “a cog in the machine.”

Try this sample Antonyms problem:

COG :
A. TOADIE
B. WRENCH
C. DIRECTOR
D. PHILATELIST
E. LIBERTINE

Choose your own answer, then click “more.”

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Brand Name Vocab: Alleviate with Aleve

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Aleve is a painkiller whose name derives from alleviate: to lessen or make easier to endure. Pretty good name for something that kills headaches, no?

English is replete with words for this concept: mitigate and palliate are pretty direct synonyms (palliate occurs often in the term palliative care, which is medical care provided to people with incurable illnesses).

Other words related to the idea of decreasing or diminishing include abate and attenuate. Words related to diminishing the anger of others, specifically, include placate, propitiate, conciliate, and appease.

Interestingly, nearly all of these words denote an action performed by someone on something or someone else. As in, Some people find that chewing gum attenuates the desire for sweets, or I’m headed over to grandmother’s house to attempt to palliate the damage caused by the risqué wedding DJ.

Abate, however, can be used with an object (The Senate voted to abate the tax) or without an object (The rain abated). These differences can be important in GRE Antonyms and Analogies questions.

Talking Like a Fancy-Pants: Florid vs. Bombastic

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English has many words to describe all-too-fancy writing. A good one is florid, which means “flowery” — that is, using an excess of adjectives, figurative language, and, often, unnecessary descriptions of the landscape.

Some people think Hawthorne was a rather florid writer:

The Scarlet LetterLike all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.

Bombastic writing has the added element of being pretentious. From Christopher Marlowe:

Our quivering lances, shaking in the air,
And bullets, like Jove’s dreadful thunderbolts,
Enroll’d in flames and fiery smouldering mists,
Shall threat the gods more than Cyclopean wars;
And with our sunbright armour, as we march,
We’ll chase the stars from heaven, and dim their eyes
That stand and muse at our admired arms.

Fun fact: bombast was once padding material used to puff up clothes!

Florid and bombastic writing is sometimes referred to as purple prose (since purple was once a sign of royalty, and sometimes lower-class people would display little bits of purple on their clothes to try to seem fancy). The Wikipedia page quotes several examples from Edward Bulwer-Lytton (the “It was a dark and stormy night” guy):

Other instances of purple prose quoted from the novel include “As soon as the Promethean spark had been fully communicated to the lady’s tube” (meaning Once the lady lit her pipe), “a nectarian beverage” (wine), “a somnambular accommodation” (a bedroom), and so on.

And finally, don’t forget grandiloquent and magniloquent, two more words for talking like a fancy-pants.

Vampires and Moon-Girls: More Vocab in Harry Potter

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Wikipedia’s list of Harry Potter characters is a veritable trove of names based on Latin and Greek roots.

The girl pictured at right is Luna Lovegood. Luna’s name comes from the root for the moon, which also gives us lunar and lunacy, which was originally thought to be associated with the changing states of the moon. (This is not a likely GRE word, but you might also be interested to know that lunambulism is “sleepwalking only in the moonlight”).

But even more fun than that is Sanguini the Vampire (the tall guy on the left!)

If you speak French, Spanish, or another Romance language, Sanguini’s name might remind you of that language’s word for “blood.” There are at least two important GRE words related to this root:

Sanguine means “cheerful; reddish, ruddy.” The Ancient Greeks thought the body was ruled by the “Four Humors”: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile (this idea also gives us the words bilious and phlegmatic). To be sanguine was to be ruled by the blood — that is, having a reddish, healthy complexion, which it was thought would also make one cheerful.

However, the “blood” idea leads much more directly to the word sanguinary, which means “bloodthirsty” — just like Sanguini.

Incidentally, consanguineous means “related by blood,” and “sangria,” the alcoholic beverage, also comes from the same Latin root (via Spanish).

Pop Quiz: Talkative Vs. Non-Talkative

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pop quizPop Quiz!

Below are eight words: four of them mean talkative or wordy. Four of them mean not talkative, or using few words.

Put each in the correct category, then click “more.”

RETICENT
PROLIX
LOQUACIOUS
TACITURN
LACONIC
VOLUBLE
GARRULOUS
TERSE

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