When I took the SATs a very long time ago, it didn't occur to us to cram for the vocabulary questions. Back then, the A in SAT still stood for "aptitude," and most people accepted the wholesome fiction that the tests were measures of raw ability that you couldn't prepare for — "like sticking a dipstick into your brain," one College Board researcher said.
It wasn't until the test-prep industry took off a few years later that people realized you could work the system, and students began boning up on the words that were likely to appear on the exam. "SAT words," people called them, with the implication that they existed only to be tested. If you wanted to use a word like "vociferous," you'd add the tag "SAT word" to signal that you weren't showing off.
Now the new College Board president, David Coleman, wants to sweep away all those writerly words like "mendacious" and "jettison" that students learn for the exam. They're to be replaced by words like "hypothesis" and "transform" — what Coleman calls "the real language of power." That's a turnabout for the College Board, from insisting that the exams were uncoachable to saying, "Well, since students are going to prep for them anyway, we'll tell them what they really need to know." But it also falls in a great American tradition of self-improvement through word power. As one 1942 vocabulary guide told its readers, "Your boss has a bigger vocabulary than you have. That's one good reason he's your boss."
That 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, (c) 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.
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