My sesquipedalian quest

September 5, 2020 — by Amanda Zhu
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Learning big words may not make you smarter, but they make you feel smarter.

 

Because of my current reclusive lifestyle, I took it upon myself to learn three new vocabulary words every day for a week. It may seem inconsequential, as the SAT appears to be worthless now, given the state of college admissions, but what do I have to lose? 

Throughout all of quarantine, my motivation to do, well, anything, has been so very evanescent. I began by creating a schedule for myself — every day after lunch, I would go on a random vocabulary generator and force myself to learn three new words. 

This process was extremely irksome, to say the least. Concurrently forcing so many new words into my brain was vexing, and initially, I vacillated before beginning my praxis

Then, thankfully, I got into the rhythm of things, and easily integrated this short (but grueling) process into my everyday life. While this seemed to work for a while, the routine eventually became humdrum and trite, so I decided to mix up my schedule and learn my words at random times to add some jubilation to the task. I approached this challenge with newfound alacrity

Unfortunately, my confidantes were not very supportive of my newly acquired hobby. It permeated my everyday life. During our FaceTimes and Messenger conversations, I would insert some random vocabulary word I learned, dragooning  them into Googling the definition. While I thought my expanded vernacular was impressive, my friends, regrettably, thought it made me sound anachronistic. I forced myself not to expostulate with them. 

Notwithstanding my care for my friends’ sanity, I am proud of my extensive knowledge of words. I now have many more words to use in my day-to-day life and am able to express my thoughts much more easily and creatively. That being said, I hope I was fortuitous enough to have used each word correctly, although I will admit, it’s very likely there are some linguistic gaffes in this article despite my best attempt at erudition.

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