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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Which organization produced a prospectus in 1913 that warned against extreme English conservatism in the spelling of foreign loan-words?
(a) Simplified Spelling Board.
(b) National Education Association.
(c) British Literary Association.
(d) Society for Pure English.

2. To how many in number does the comparative adjective relate?
(a) Five or more.
(b) Three or more.
(c) Two.
(d) Four or less.

3. Which phrase did Oliver Wendell Holmes use to describe the state of the person who makes use of slang?
(a) Creative genius.
(b) Bumbling idiocy.
(c) Mental atrophy.
(d) Intellectual alacrity.

4. What spelling change is made from English to American in words such as "connection"?
(a) Connexion to connection.
(b) Conection to connection.
(c) Connectin to connection.
(d) Conexion to connection.

5. Who was the author of the couplet that Mencken quotes: "For thou art a girl as much brighter than her / As he was a poet sublimer than me"?
(a) Matthew Prior.
(b) Matthew Arnold.
(c) John Keats.
(d) Percy Bysse Shelley.

Short Answer Questions

1. From what newspaper does Mencken derive the story with which he opens Chapter 11.2?

2. What does Mencken say, in colloquial American, has obliterated the verb?

3. Which nationality does Mencken claim is most eager to Americanize the names of their children?

4. For which voiceless consonant is the voiced "d" substituting with growing regularity, according to Mearns?

5. In what century did England replace the "i-sound" with the "oi-sound" in words such as "boy"?

(see the answer keys)

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