Registered: Aug 2000
Location: In a Blue, Blue State
Posts: 13081

100 Words That All High School Graduates — And Their Parents — Should Know

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BOSTON, MA — The editors of the American Heritage® dictionaries have compiled a list of 100 words they recommend every high school graduate should know.

"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language."

The following is the entire list of 100 words:

abjure
abrogate
abstemious
acumen
antebellum
auspicious
belie
bellicose
bowdlerize
chicanery
chromosome
churlish
circumlocution
circumnavigate
deciduous
deleterious
diffident
enervate
enfranchise
epiphany
equinox
euro
evanescent
expurgate
facetious
fatuous
feckless
fiduciary
filibuster
gamete
gauche
gerrymander
hegemony
hemoglobin
homogeneous
hubris
hypotenuse
impeach
incognito
incontrovertible
inculcate
infrastructure
interpolate
irony
jejune
kinetic
kowtow
laissez faire
lexicon
loquacious
lugubrious
metamorphosis
mitosis
moiety
nanotechnology
nihilism
nomenclature
nonsectarian
notarize
obsequious
oligarchy
omnipotent
orthography
oxidize
parabola
paradigm
parameter
pecuniary
photosynthesis
plagiarize
plasma
polymer
precipitous
quasar
quotidian
recapitulate
reciprocal
reparation
respiration
sanguine
soliloquy
subjugate
suffragist
supercilious
tautology
taxonomy
tectonic
tempestuous
thermodynamics
totalitarian
unctuous
usurp
vacuous
vehement
vortex
winnow
wrought
xenophobe
yeoman
ziggurat

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Registered: Mar 2007
Location: Devil's Lake
Posts: 336

My Blood Elf Paladin is named Unctuous.

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Registered: Jul 2001
Location: Little Rock.
Posts: 2598

No surprise I've never even seen some of those words. I can't really see ever needing them.

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Registered: Feb 2004
Location: in colorado somewhere!
Posts: 26136

Fuck that shit.

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EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!

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Registered: Jul 2000
Location: Sedona, Arizona
Posts: 19115

The last word is a stepped pyramid. Little Al told me that.

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Registered: Apr 2004
Location: Insatiation
Posts: 9026

Tumescent should be on the list.

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location: In a Blue, Blue State
Posts: 13081

Tumescent perfectly describes most of the members here.

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Registered: Feb 2003
Location: Oceanside, CA
Posts: 5154

I recognize all of them, but there are a number of them I would have trouble using in a sentence or defining clearly.

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Registered: May 2007
Location:
Posts: 94

What the FUCK do they mean by 'words you should know'?

How fucking DARE they fucking tell ME what to think? Fucking assholes.

The words you should know are the ones that let you communicate your ideas efficiently and clearly. Or do they think that knowing a hundred obscure colors will make you a better painter?

Those supercilious motherFUCKERS, man.

Maybe they mean 'oooh, oooh, we're compile a list of 100 tricky little words that a bunch omnipotent linguistic cocksuckers think they can inculcate into us feckless assholes from their monolithic hegemony of knowledge'?

Well FUCK THEM. I won't kowtow to those motherfuckers. I mean, the paradigm of quotidian nomenclature tends to be wrought from a reciprocal and evanescent moment of communication and this deleterious chicanery is just a fatuous attempt to subjugate the masses through an oligarchic imposition of the orthography of thought itself, leading to...

... oh, those tricky motherfuckers.

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Registered: Aug 2000
Location:
Posts: 7922

Wow. That last post gave me an albino black sheep flashback.

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Registered: Mar 2004
Location: USA
Posts: 24756

Euro?

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