While not helping any of the children with their homework this week, I realized that I was pretty lost on most of the words in their vocabulary list.
And while I was definitely not helping them, I looked up several of the definitions and found that many of them seemed to fit with a familiar story. So, in order to help improve my vocabulary and hopefully get an A on some English homework, I present to you this classic Christmas story filled with the words in bold from two recent high school vocabulary lists.
Please let me know if you also think these lists were difficult or if I am just stupid.
The answer may be both.
Once upon a time on Christmas Eve, there was a parsimonious old man who worked in an old business office. On this evening, some charity workers stopped by to ask if he would make a donation and also explain what parsimonious means and tell them how to pronounce it (par-sim-own-ee-ous?).
Although the old man had a pecuniary advantage in the business world due to his sinecure position, he chose not to give the charity workers any money. In fact, the whole idea seemed extrinsic to him. Instead, he spoke to the charity workers in a trenchant manner and suggested that they should dismantle and then abrogate the social service organizations and decrease the surplus population!
That made them sad and also very confused, so they left the old man alone with his pesky clerk who annoyed him further by asking for Christmas Day off. While he often found the clerk irritating, he did respect how abstemious he was with the food in the office, so he begrudgingly decided to give him the day off.
After the clerk learned he would be given Christmas Day as a vacation day, he finished his work in a cursory manner and rushed home to begin celebrating the holiday.
Soon after, the old man retired to his home to have a sumptuous dinner and then go to sleep. When he got home, though, he was interrupted by a fettered spirit who was redolent of his old partner. The old man did not know how his old partner could still be extant, but he said he would listen to him. The spirit told then told the old man that he is forced to live a nomadic existence due to the type of life he led when he was alive.
The spirit then reviled the old man with rife comments about his life and told him he would be visited by three more ghosts. Before he left, he also said that the old man had been even more complicit than him in my actions, and said that he should heed the words of the ghosts.
When the first ghost arrived, it showed the old man several memories that filled him with nostalgia. The memories included disparate old relatives and the old man’s former girlfriend, who looked quite sultry. Although he felt like an interloper, the old man was very interested in seeing the old memories and his hot former girlfriend.
The second ghost then appeared and showed him several things in the present time and seemed to indict the old man for not acting with good cheer. Frankly, this ghost made several derogatory comments that made the old man very upset.
The ghost also showed him glimpses of the clerk’s life, and how he seemed to show great valor despite his troubles. The ghost also seemed to think the old man was culpable for the clerk’s problems!
“Humbug,” he replied with asperity as the second ghost vanished.
The third ghost then showed up in a nebulous manner and then took the old man to a large edifice. He was apparently in the future and by some unfortunate vicissitudes, he had perished!
“Is there a way this can be precluded?” the old man asked the ghost. The ghost, though, stood there like a bulwark and said nothing.
Right then, the old man thankfully awoke from his repose back in his own home, and immediately recanted all of his beliefs about Christmas.
“Merry Christmas,” he declaimed out of his window in a stentorian manner. “I will be the antithesis of what I was before! I will even be altruistic!”
And after that, the old man was never seen as parsimonious and instead was often seen as the paragon of Christmas. In fact, many said that he was always “Christmasy”, which seemed to be a fitting epithet.
Any rife or derogatory comments about my vocabulary knowledge? Please comment below. And thanks for reading, hopefully it did not put you into a state of repose.
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