Ronaldo of Superfície Reflexiva pointed me at the Schmies Vocabulary Test, which I of course had to take immediately.

This test consists of 200 obscure word pairs which are either (almost) the same or (almost) opposite in meaning. I got 184 right (16 errors), putting me at #15 in the site’s “Top 100”.

Here are the pairs I got wrong:

11. adminicular/corroborative

16. tempestuous/halcyon

18. busybody/quidnunc

42. weaken/enervate

46. truckle/withstand

65. hebetate/blunt

84. nimiety/paucity

96. precocial/altricial

109. Croesus/Dives

115. concave/gibbous

146. diaphoretic/sudorific

152. apopemptic/valedictory

153. prospective/quondam

161. litotes/meiosis

169. extended/compendious

174. telamones/atlantes

and I must say that 42, 46, 115 and 169 I should have gotten right, but I was in a hurry… the other pairs comprise words I’d never heard before. On the other hand, I guessed 6 other such pairs right, where I could reason from cognates in other languages.

In my defense, I didn’t have a classical education (meaning, no Greek or Latin)…