Since the GRE has pretty much taken over my life for the past little while, it will probably dominate any blog posts I do from here until November 24 when I finally take it.  Right now I'm mainly focusing on studying the vocabulary words, and I have to admit it is a lot harder than I thought.  Mainly cause I can't pronounce about 25% of the words.  One word that I can pronounce, however, is "academic" which has my favorite definition ever--related to a school; not practical or directly useful.  Makes school seem pointless, doesn't it?

But back to the unable to pronounce the words part.  I HATE this word...indefatigable.  That does not roll off the tongue by any stretch of the imagination.  It means tireless, and this is how the book used it in a sentence, "Although the effort of taking out the garbage exhausted wayne for the entire morning, when it came to partying, he was indefatigable."  (WHOA!  I just literally figured out how to pronounce that word as I said it out loud while typing.  It's like fatigue but with an "inde" in front of it.  I love epiphanies.)  Even though I can now pronounce it, I have to say I still hate the word.  Really, who would use it when tireless works just as well if not better?  There is a common misconception that when writing a paper or story it is better to use big words like indefatigable.  False.  When writing anything, use the simplest words that still convey your emotion or meaning.  It only weighs down what you're trying to write when you use obscure words or words with more than 3 syllables.  So all you poor spellers out there, don't feel bad if you can't spell the hard word, usually the easier word works better anyway.  Trust me, I'm an English major.  I have read and written more papers than I care to admit to, and the ones that are always the best are the most straightforward with common, understandable language.

It called circumlocution, fyi.  My german teacher always told us to circumlocute (I know circumlocute isn't a word, but I needed circumlocution as a verb and not a noun so I made up my own word) around a word if we didn't know it.  Let's say I didn't know the word dark in german but I knew black.  So instead of saying the dark night, I would say the black night.  Not quite the same thing, but close enough that it really doesn't matter.  The same thing with spelling.  If you know a similar word that you can spell, use it.  Don't worry about the word you can't spell.  I can't tell you how many essay tests I've had to work around because spelling was part of the grade.  I would find out halfway through a word that I really had no idea how to spell it correctly, so I would go rework the sentence to use a word I did know.  Be willing to use smaller words or a more wordy sentence if only to play to your strengths.  It reminds me of a test in high school for my Political Science class.  Mr. Crump gave us back our essays and I had spelled "separate" wrong.  I had spelled it "seperate."  I guess a lot of kids in the class had done the same thing because he actually stopped the class to teach us how to spell it.  He said something along the lines of, "'A' students can spell separate correctly because there is an 'a' in it.  Not an 'e.'"  I had always had trouble remembering if it was an "a" or an "e" but after that, I never forgot.  Good ol' Mr. Crump.  Love that man.

So, yeah, circumlocute.  The end :)

P.s. my dad just corrected me on the pronunciation of indefatigable.  Yep, even after my epiphany I still got it wrong.  Just another reason not to use ridiculous words.