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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 4.4 | Chapter 4.5.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What use of storage was added to the American meaning of the word "barn?"
(a) Cattle.
(b) Horses.
(c) Crops.
(d) Chickens.

2. What word does Mencken find Dr. John Dewey using in place of the word "opium?"
(a) Poppy.
(b) Crack.
(c) Skag.
(d) Dope.

3. According to Mencken at the beginning of Chapter 1.3, what do the novelists and newspapermen on either side of the Atlantic ocean delight in?
(a) Localisms.
(b) Intercommunication.
(c) Travel.
(d) Publishing.

4. What does John S. Farmer describe the Western vernacular as being?
(a) Racy and pungent.
(b) Irreverent and irrelevant.
(c) Dry and prolonged.
(d) Flippant and pointless.

5. Whose clarity of prevision does Mencken praise in the opening of Chapter 1.1?
(a) Franklin.
(b) Jefferson.
(c) Waldo.
(d) Madison.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who "tries" a legal case in England?

2. How many dialects dominate American English, according to Chapter 1.5?

3. What word in common honorifics did Edwin S. Gould protest against omitting in 1867?

4. Which of the following did the African slaves NOT introduce to American English?

5. Who protested the adoption of the broad "a" in an 1857 work entitled "The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table"?

(see the answer key)

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