English usage and grammar

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Need some fancy words (self.english)

submitted 4 months ago by k2helix to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'll be sitting a CAE exam this Friday and I'd enjoy learning some vocabulary I can use when doing it.

Some idiomatic expressions, collocations or just some fancy adjectives or adverbs that you think could be useful. Something that if the examiner saw would make them say wow.

There is an speaking part where it's mostly informal language that I'm going to use and a more formal writing part.

Thanks for your help.

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[–] Carrolade 3 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Since you need some quickly, I'd read some Ursula K Le Guin short stories. She's very good at using an expansive vocab fluidly and organically without overdoing it. You don't want to necessarily overdo it, it ends up sounding bad. English has so many options to choose from that you need to sprinkle in more esoteric ones tastefully to avoid coming across as foolish, pretentious, or even being intentionally obfuscatory. Unless you're a university professor, then you get unique permission to use all the weird words you want.

Some of my favorites off the top of my head: obfuscate, vehemently, scintillating, lithe, poignant, behoves, loathsome.

[–] k2helix 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Behove and poignant are really useful for the writing and speaking tasks. Thank you!

[–] Carrolade 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

np. It does behove me to inform you that the word behove is almost always encountered exclusively in this particular phrasing structure. "It behoves me to..." "He/she felt/was behoved to..." and so on and so forth. It's good when you want to sound formal and just a touch antiquated while still remaining within the bounds of normalcy.

With poignant, just make sure you pronounce it correctly if you use it verbally. Mispronouncing it in an exam would be a most poignant experience, and best avoided.

Good luck.

[–] k2helix 3 points 3 months ago

I used it! I needed to write a proposal for an open day in my company with suggestions for advertising and ideas to recruit the best graduates.

After putting forward my points, I said something among the lines of "It behoves us to make the company successful"

Pretty happy with how the writing went, can't say so of the speaking - it was really hard!