Meryl's Notes Blog

That smarts! I get my first perfect score in Word Power from Reader’s Digest and they don’t have it online. Oh, sure they have a Word Power game, but it doesn’t the one I want to show you guys. It covers the language of the Internet. Not trying to show off here… like I said, it’s the first one I got all correct in the years I’ve been doing Word Power. Why do I do it?

Sit down, children, let me tell you a story. OK, not a story or even a tall tale. When I was a young’un, my parents sent me to tutoring that covered vocabulary words, reading comprehension (gag), and idioms. Born with a profound hearing loss, my knowledge of vocabulary was growing slower than my peers. Because I couldn’t hear conversations all around me, I missed the big words and how they’re used.

Thanks to Mrs. Kleinman, she taught me the difference between imply and infer and I never had trouble distinguishing them. I also learned funny stuff like "hold your horses", "it’s raining cats and dogs" and "money doesn’t grow on trees". These may not sound that funny, but when you were 10-years-old and seeing these phrases with a picture matching the phrase — it’s funnier than it sounds.

Over the years, I saw her a few times. Once my mom told me that she said that I am doing great with vocabulary and it isn’t a problem anymore (something like that). That stuck with me. So, once a month when I get my Reader’s Digest, I always save the Word Power and do it when I find the time. Also, I try to read A Daily Dose of Useless Knowledge on the PDA, which provides "Word of the Day" along with other useless, but interesting facts.

Another computer related item from Reader’s Digest: I want to know what good is a web search engine that returns 324,909,188 matches to my key word. That’s like saying, "Good news! We’ve located the product you’re looking for. It’s on Earth." — W. Bruce Cameron.