Wednesday, September 09, 2009

Into the Words

I'm giving weekly vocabulary tests in my English class. They get 10 new words per week, and each week they're tested on the 10 new words, plus 10 of the old words.

I try to make the tests somewhat interesting or quirky, mostly for my own entertainment, but sometimes it's a real stretch of my creativity to come up with 20 sentences or so per week. Sometimes, the results end up like this:

Dr. Horrible looked into his web camera with a(n) (1) ______ expression. His black eye made it obvious that his plan to steal the wonderflonium had been (2) ______(e)d by his arch nemesis, Captain Hammer. As he began telling the story to his faithful blog viewers, though, Dr. Horrible (3) ______ (e)d the tale to make himself look good. He would also (4) ______ly throw in an evil laugh or two, just to practice.

“You’ll see!” he told his camera. “I know I’m being (5)
______ now about my plans. I can’t give the details here. In (6) ______ I shouldn’t have told you about my planned wonderflonium theft. It turns out, the police and the mayor also read my blog. I sort of (7) ______ly ruined my own heist. I should have also used more (8) ______ in describing my status on Facebook ‘Stealing the wonderflonium’ was probably not the (9) ______ sentence to post mid-heist.”

Dr. Horrible looked sad for a moment, then continued with a more (10)
______ tone as his confidence returned. “But you’ll see!” he declared. “All of you who just (11) ______ at me now, you’ll see that my plans are not (12) ______ I’m not an idiot, and I’m not just (13______ing away my time with these heists. You moral, (14) ______ people – even you will (15) ______ me one day when you see the power of my wonderflonium-powered freeze ray! And then all of those who hate the government and society and stupid jerks like Captain Hammer – all (16) ______ people – I will lead them to world domination!”

He laughed evilly again. “Once I get into the Evil League of Evil, their evil funds could (17)
______ my entire operations. But it’s not about making money. It’s about destroying the status quo. Because the status is not… quo. The world’s a mess, and I just need to rule it. I’ll even (18) ______ with Bad Horse, if that’s what it takes to get into the Evil League of Evil. Bad Horse… with his terrible death whinny….”

Dr. Horrible rubbed his eyes tiredly. He hadn’t been sleeping well and he couldn’t shake that feeling of (19)
______. “You’ll see. You’ll all see.”

Just as he reached to turn off the camera, though, the door behind him burst open. Captain Hammer leapt through crying, “Dr. Horrible! I have found your evil lair!” ending the blog post with the words of the arch nemeses (20)
______ (e)d together.

Here are the words:
Ambiguous, Collaborate, Despondent, Detriment, Dexterous, Discretion, Dissident, Embellish, Facetious, Fritter, Gregarious, Inadvertent, Inane, Instigate, Juxtapose, Lethargy, Optimum, Ostentatious, Resilient, Retrospect, Rudimentary, Scoff, Scrupulous, Sensory, Sporadic, Squelch, Subsidize, Venerate, Vicarious, Zealot

How'd you do?

1 comment:

  1. You CAN'T do this to me! I have no time for it but you know I'm going to sit down and figure it out. Blast you and your challenges and my "over-achiever-who-must-be-the-teacher's-pet-ness!"

    ReplyDelete