Sir Monkeypants and I just discovered FreeRice, a site that claims to donate rice to third world nations with each vocabulary-related multiple-choice question you answer correctly. It sets your vocab at a certain level, based on what kind of words you’ve been able to identify in the past, and we’ve become a little obsessed with upping our score. We’re often able to bring it up to a 40 but if we really screw up, we drop back down to 36 or 37. We’re not even cheating, either.
This site fits in perfectly with the book I just finished reading, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx And Crake. It’s set in the near future, and the main character is obsessed with words that have drifted out of the English language — words that, within the last couple of decades, have become extinct. Every so often, when he’s stressed and trying to comfort himself, he rhymes off a list of such words, usually somewhere between 4 and 8 to a list. And on a typical list in the book, I knew one, maybe two of the words.
The others were so strange, so obscure, that I thought for sure that Atwood had made them up to emphasise the fact that they didn’t seem to belong in the language. But I just spent about ten minutes looking up a handful of them online, and it appears that they are all legit. It’s crazy how many words are out there in the language that I literally have never heard before. I’ve done a lot of reading and I usually do better than average (although not outstanding) at vocab tests, but now I feel really humbled.
Here’s the list that I just looked up — all valid words availble for use if you want to dazzle or confuse your friends:
frass
purblind
quarto
subfusc
grutch
fungible
pullulate
pistic
cerements
trull
prattlement
opsimath
woad
And there’s dozens more like it in the novel. Fabulous, fabulous book by the way — definitely highly recommended.
Edited to add: All but four of the above words were rejected by Firefox’s spell checker. I guess I’m not the only one who has never heard of them!
TurtleHead 
FreeRice is such mind crack! I started because of the sites self-professed social benefits, but now it’s just another outlet for my low-level word game addiction.
Freerice is awesome and very addictive. I discovered it a couple of weeks ago and now I play all the time! By the totals donated page, it can only be assumed that more people are playing as they hear about it.
I think that the little vocab score drives me more than the totals donated though…
Would you recommend “Oryx And Crake”?
I’d definitely recommend it — one of the best books I’ve read this year. I like Atwood in general, and this one is one of my favourites. She’s such a smart writer!
Yes, that FreeRice thing is addictive. Do you think it’s for real about the rice donation?
I read Oryx and Crake a couple of years ago, as I typically love everything Atwood writes. However, I really thought it was not a good book. I think she was up for an award for it, so clearly I’m the one who didn’t get it. I just felt she was out of her element with the subject matter.
At work, someone has used the work “fungibility” in one of our high-level design specifications. I always wonder what it is they’re trying to say …
Oops, forgot to log in …
Man, someone actually used fungibility? Crazy. Firefox doesn’t even recognise it as a word! It means freely interchangeable, like, you can trade x of one item for y of one item and they are basically the same thing. (Not that I knew that. I looked it up.)
I’m an Atwood fan myself and I loved Oryx and Crake…even more than the others I’ve read. I don’t want to give too much away in case anyone is reading this who isn’t into spoilers, but I just loved the ending — the way it was so ambiguous, and really made you think about what should happen, what you really wanted to see happen. I thought it was fascinating, the way she brought you to a point where you wondered if Crake was right to do what he did.
Plus, the word lists were really cool :).
What other books of hers have you read, and would recommend? I’ve read Alias Grace (good, but it felt a little forced to me, like she was trying too hard to wedge in every little bit of research she had done) and The Blind Assassin (loved it).
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned this yet — haven’t you ever played Balderdash? I think I’ve had the same experience there — looking up words that it seemed just couldn’t possibly be real, yet pretty much every one I tried was in the dictionary.
I read Handmaid’s Tale a while ago – I liked it. I assume that it would be even more disturbing now that the right-wing has been in power in the US for a while.
If you’re interested in vocabulary and mind expanding books, I suggest Thomas Pynchon.
I’ve only read his novel “V.” but I’m got “Gravity’s Rainbow” and “The Crying of Lot 49” on my short list. V. was a struggle to get through but I’m glad I finished it. Mostly what I remember of the novel is the need to have a dictionary at hand every few pages and that some of the descriptive passages were awe inspiring. The story itself was quite a jumble and I didn’t bother to use of the Pynchon guide books. “The Crying of Lot 49” is often suggested as a good short introduction to Pynchon.
The freerice.com wiki page is interesting. I can confirm that John Breen is registered as the owner of the freerice.com domain. Now I have to go see how long I can keep my score above 40 and probably also start-up a ricebot to squeeze some money out of advertisers for a good cause.