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nprfreshair:

Linguist Geoff Nunberg wonders what exactly students learn when they’re flipping through those SAT vocabulary flashcards —-

“Faith in vocabulary begins with the belief that every new word you learn comes tied to a new idea. But the words you study are always tied to old ones. That’s what flashcards are for, to pair exotic words with familiar ones: "amicable” means friendly, “superficial” means shallow. That’s all you need to know to answer those SAT sentence-completion questions. “They tried to interest her in many things but they couldn’t overcome her _______.” Should it be (a) apathy, (b) fervor, © acuity or (d) aloofness? It’s “apathy,” of course — what they want you to do is fill in the blank with the word that makes the resulting sentence least interesting.”

There are so many problems with the SATs (and the IQ tests with which they correlate so closely).  But I learned some of my favorite words (officious, gregarious, Pyrrhic victory) from SAT prep.  I was a late reader and not a very fluent one and I had (have) a bad habit of just skipping over words I didn’t know and filling them in from context.  But once you are introduced to a word, even in a very simplified synonym based context (do real synonyms even really exist?) then you can start to see it everywhere and to absorb the real denotation and connotation.