Up Your Score (13 page)

obscene; coarse; humorous (see
LEWD
)

Many
bawdy
jokes have to do with certain parts of the
body
.

displaying or imparting joy

“
Be terrific
,” said the Hare Krishna with a
beatific
smile.

to envy, to resent

To
be
holding a
grudge
for so long against me means that you must
begrudge
my happy life.

trick

“The [Evil Testing] Serpent
beguiled
me and I did eat the apple.” (Genesis 3:13)

delayed; late

We sent a
belated
birthday present and in return got a month-old piece of ice-cream cake.

violent; warlike

You’ll know you’re sitting next to a
bellicose
person if during the test his sharpened number 2 pencil into your
belly goes
.

kind

Superman may be the
benevolent
protector of the world, but have you ever noticed that he wears his underpants outside his tights?

to scold severely

If you don’t get into college, your parents will
berate
you. If you don’t do A work, your teachers will
berate
(B-rate)
you.

lacking something needed

He felt sad and
bereft
just thinking about how she didn’t love him; now he would
be left
without her.

to become engaged

She discovered that he wasn’t wearing a tuxedo—she really was
betrothed
to a penguin.

every two years

Note:
This word is decodable:

My social life has been reduced to
biennial
parties.

not stimulating; dull

Note:
Remember,
bland
starts with
bla
.

I found the movie about the politics of cauliflower rather
bland.

flattery

The sycophants obsequiously lavished me with
blandishments
. (Yes, you should look up each of these words.)

ruined; destroyed; withered

When much of California was
blighted
by fires, the former governor tried to drown his feelings of hopelessness in
Bud Light
.

rowdy

We have male cheerleaders at our school. When they get in front of the crowd, those
boys stir us
up until we’re
boisterous
.

grandiloquent (wordy, pompous) in speech or writing

At the end of his long, boring,
bombastic
speech, the self- satisfied tyrant received a
bomb basket
as a farewell gift.

cockiness; a braggart

Braggadocios
tend to do a lot of empty
bragg
ing.

briefness

When Janet had a 20-page paper due, but wanted to go out, her friends suggested, “You can write your paper with great
brevity
and
brave a D
.”

brief; curt; gruff; discourteous

The people who take tickets at the movies are always
brusque
, as though they’re not genuinely interested in every single person who walks by them.

pastoral; typical of farms and rural life

The scene was
bucolic

So we started to fr
olic

In our feet so bare,

Whoops! The cow chips were there!

self-assertive

The
bumptious
people
bumped us
out of line, so we gave them all fierce head-butts.

to grow; sprout; flourish

Madonna’s career
burgeoned
as soon as she changed the title of her unsuccessful song “Like a
Burgeon
.”

to polish

One of the housekeeper’s jobs was
burnishing
the furnishings.

It’s story time again, boys and girls:

With a
bawdy
exclamation, the burly buccaneers brutishly threw us out of the helicopter
bereft
of any parachute, and the
brevity
of our flight and
brusqueness
of our landing were not the
bucolic
experiences described in our blonde travel agent’s
bland
brochure.

We found ourselves in a jungle with all sorts of
baneful
beasties crawling around our feet and
baleful
animal noises echoing around us.

“Yo,” said my
bumptious
companion with
braggadocio
, as he
burnished
his machete. “What say we bust our way out of this place?”

But before I could respond, we were captured by a
bellicose
and
boisterous
tribe of natives about to perform its
belated
biennial
human sacrifice to the fish goddess. We called a
barrister
, who offered
beatific
blandishments
. But in order to save our skins we both had to be
betrothed
to the chief’s daughter Brunnehilde.

“Yo,” said my companion. “This is a bit of a bummer. I should
berate
you for
bombastically
beguiling
me into going on this
blighted
vacation.”

Then the axe fell and the
bacchanalian
rituals honoring the
benevolent
fish goddess began.

hiding place (pronounced “cash”)

The thieves
stashed
the
cash
in the
cache
.

sounding discordant; terrible and generally unpleasant to listen to; the opposite of euphonious

As Dracula arose from his
coffin
, the werewolves let out a
cacophonous
wail.

corpse

The medical students named their
cadaver
Ernie so that they could be “working in dead Ernest.”

to coax

“Yes, you
can, Joel
,” they
cajoled
him. “You can become a professional thumb whistler if you set your mind to it.”

unfeeling; unsympathetic

Brian complained of the
callus
on his big toe, but Meg remained
callous
.

If you don’t like that sentence, don’t
call us
, we’re
callous
.

to slander

Note:
This is one of a bunch of SAT words with this meaning—see
page 155
.

slander; defamation

It was
calumny
when I wrote in a
column
in
The New York Times
that you enjoy poisoning Arctic wombats. I hated you, so I
calumniated
you.

frankness; candidness

“Speaking with complete
candor
, Hansel,” said the wicked witch, “I have chopped Gretel up and
canned her
.”

ill-natured; quarrelsome

“Bloody screaming sea dogs, I
can’t anchor us
!” the
cantankerous
captain cried.

spacious

I wonder why they put such
capacious
spaces around this word.

to surrender (see
RECAPITULATE
, which does not mean resurrender)

Bear Grylls never
capitulates
on
Man vs. Wild
.

unpredictable; following whim

The album charts were
capricious
; one week Kanye West was on top—but as soon as we had catalogued all the swear words, Taylor Swift took over.

fault-finding

“What?! You’re only in the Cs? And your room’s still messy, and you haven’t cooked us dinner,” said the
captious
review-book authors.

rotting flesh

The lion tore a hefty chunk of flesh out of the zebra’s neck. Later the jackals came by and pulled more entrails out of the
carrion
. After the jackals left, the vultures remained to
carry on
with devouring it.

to punish

Castration
is a severe form of
castigation
.

cleansing; allowing a release of tension or emotion

Manek’s method of preparing for the SAT is
cathartic
(see
page 15
).

burning; characterized by a bitter wit

When she saw the ugly necklace that her boyfriend had bought her, she said to him
caustically
, “How much did that
cost? Ick
!”

Note:
Being sar
castic
and being
caustic
often go hand in hand, so relate them in your memory via the nonword sar
caustic
.

to burn tissue (usually because a wound isn’t clotting)

When the bleeding
caught her eyes
, the doctor knew that she would have to
cauterize
the patient’s skin.

to raise unnecessary or trivial objections

When I told the vet that I feed my cow Diet Coke, he
caviled
about how it would make my
calf ill
.

swiftness, speed

When the light turned green, the chauffeur floored the gas pedal with
celerity
and we suddenly ac
celer
ated. I nearly spilled my
celery tea
.

condition of being celibate

without sex; unmarried

The nun declared, “I think being
celibate
is really something to
celeb
r
ate
.”