Arianne Cohen - Confessions of a High School Word Nerd

Confessions of a High School Word Nerd — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Confessions of a High School Word Nerd" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

1234567...51

Table of Contents

A PENGUIN BOOK

CONFESSIONS OF A HIGH SCHOOL WORD NERD

ARIANNE COHEN, a 2003 Harvard graduate, is the author of Help, Its Broken!: The Fix-It Bible for the Repair-Impaired. She writes a weekly column for amNewYork, and her articles have appeared in Life and the New York Times. She lives in New York City.

COLLEEN KINDER is a 2003 Yale graduate and the author of the current campus bestseller Delaying the Real World: A Twentysomethings Guide to Seeking Adventure. She resides in Iowa, where she attends the University of Iowas MFA program in creative nonfiction.

To Kate Storey and Richard Mitchell at Holy Angels
Academy, Judy Krouse at Germantown Academy, and all of
the high school teachers who make big words palatable.

INTRODUCTION

So youre buckling down to study for the SAT. Youve got your fat book of practice tests on one side, and on the other, a heap of flashcards of words that you dont know. But theres problem. Two problems, actually. You soon discover that practice test is a fancy term for self-torture, and as you flip hrough your alphabetized vocabulary cards, all the words start o look exactly the same: BIG.

This book is the solution to your attempts to study-but-ot- really-study. Weve taken all of the Suffering, Angst, and orture out of the SAT. In the pages ahead, youll find hilarius stories about high school life, sprinkled with the language ou need to ace the SAT. Our wild tales of sports games, first isses, and senior pranks also helpfully include vocabulary in old. With all of the definitions footnoted right below, you ont have to lift a finger to learn.

The young people who wrote these stories know what its ike to be in high school. They also know how to laugh about t and tell a damn good story. Take Dave, for example. Dave elped execute the best senior prank in his high schools hisory by filling his school lobby with squealing pigs. Or Laure, who decided to expedite her first kiss by calling a boy in her class and asking him if he wanted to smooch.

Execute: v. to do; perform; carry out.

Sound too good to count as studying? The authors of this book are so smart that theyve taken all the work out of test prep! As you read ahead, youll also sit shotgun with Colleen while she fails her first (and second) road test and nearly runs over her English teacher. Youll get to watch Chris master-mind (well, sort of) a band-camp water-balloon massacre, volunteer with Kara as one of her mental-hospital patients escapes, and run alongside Lauren as she pursues her nemesis on the soccer field. And visiting Arianne, youll find out what its like to be evicted from multiple homes (Yes, that means kicked out).

We were all in your shoes just a few years ago. We wrote this book to make you laugh about the silly drama and wild memories of high school, and to prepare you for the SAT. By the time youre done perusing this book, youll know those SAT words cold, and ace the test. But if you laugh half as hard as we did, you wont even notice that youre learning.

Expedite: v. to quicken the progress of.

Evict: v. to expel; dispossess.

Peruse: v. to read attentively.

CONFESSIONS OF A DILIGENT KISSER

Laure de Vulpillieres

Why did kissing Chris seem like a good idea? To understand that, you need to know about my biggest high school insecurity: I was not particularly feminine. My whole life, Ive been a tomboy to the core, spurning dresses and cute shoes, and embracing pants and sneakers instead. Flower prints still make me gag.

Before adolescence, I was content being a tomboy. But when I hit the teenage years, I saw that my friends were turning into attractive women, and I was becoming, um... well, I wasnt sure what I was becoming. My insecurities grew, culminating in a roar of peer pressure that made me determined to prove my femininity. To begin, I tried dressing like a ravishing vixen. I grew my hair long, wore ower prints, and dabbled in the world of ostentatious jewelry. I looked like a displaced hippie.

Insecurity: n. self-doubt; something unstable.

Feminine: adj. relating to, or like, woman.

Spurn: v. to reject with disdain.

Content: adj. satisfied; easy in mind.

Culminate: v. to reach the highest point.

Vixen: n. a sexually attractive woman.

Dabble: v. to do anything in a superficial manner.

Ostentatious: adj. pretentiously displayed.

Displace: v. to put out of the usual or proper place.

Thus began my plot to kiss Chris.

My school was in the French countryside, where girls are even more girly than they are in America. My dad is French, and I grew up near Paris before moving to the United States for college. In case youre curious, kids from France have all the same hang-ups as American high schoolersthey just complain about them in a different language, while eating bizarre foods.

Our high school was not dissimilar to yours. It always seemed like everyone was making out with each other. In actuality, only a handful of people were making out, and they were just talking about it bombastically. Those who werent making out would just fancifully exaggerate the stories of those who were. High school, after all, was all about hyperbole . At the time, I stationed myself among the best of the gossipmongers, where it really did seem like every single female but me had established her credibility by making out with a boy.

So I decided to do the same. Luring a guy to my lips would validate my attractiveness. Once I had smooched, I would be indelibly marked as feminine in the eyes of the world (ahem, the school). Perfect.

Bizarre: adj. odd; whimsical; grotesque.

Dissimilar: adj. unlike.

Bombastic: adj. pompous; overblown.

Exaggerate: v. to represent as large, important, etc., beyond the truth; magnify falsely.

Hyperbole: n. obvious exaggeration; an extravagant statement. Station: v. to assign; place.

Gossipmonger: n. a person who starts or spreads gossip.

Credibility: n. the quality or power of inspiring belief.

Lure: v. to entice.

Validate: v. to make valid; to confirm.

Indelible: adj. not capable of being deleted or obliterated.

Chris sat in front of me in class, which gave me ample opportunity to stare at the back of his head and think up a plan. From behind, I had a clear view of his back arched over his desk, kind of like lArc de Triomphe, but covered by a blue T-shirt and longish brown hair. Chris was one of those average guys with average features and average charisma, not to mention average personality and average intelligence. His one exceptional skill was the ability to draw negligible attention to himself. I may have been the only person in the school to have ever stared at him.

Chris was not the kind of guy you would write

Next page

1234567...51

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Georgia Tahoma Arial Verdana

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Confessions of a High School Word Nerd»

Look at similar books to Confessions of a High School Word Nerd. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Nicholas Falletta

McGraw-Hills SSAT/ISEE

Petersons

Master the Catholic High School Entrance Exams

Vince Kotchian

SSAT and ISEE For Dummies

SSAT Exambusters

SSAT-ISEE Test Middle School Vocabulary—Exambusters Flashcards—Workbook 1 of 3

American Heritage

100 Words Every High School Freshman Should Know

Angela B. Peery

Vocabulary in a SNAP: 100+ Lessons for Secondary Instruction (Teaching Vocabulary to Middle and High School Students with Quick and Easy Vocabulary Exercises)

Petersons (Firm : 2006- )

Master the Catholic High School Entrance Exams 2013

Nadler Burton Jay

Words You Should Know in High School: 1000 Essential Words to Build Vocabulary, Improve Standardized Test Scores, and Write Successful Papers

Mark Stewart

McGraw-Hills Catholic High School Entrance Exams

Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions

Kaplan nursing school entrance exams

Manhattan Prep

500 Advanced Words: GRE Vocabulary Flash Cards

Manhattan Prep

500 Essential Words: GRE Vocabulary Flash Cards

Discussion, reviews of the book Confessions of a High School Word Nerd and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.