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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Which case of the noun in English yet has an inflection at the time of Mencken's writing?
(a) The ablative.
(b) The genitive.
(c) The accusative.
(d) The dative.

2. What sort of distinction frequently occurs between an adverb and its primary adjective?
(a) Numerical.
(b) Pronunciation.
(c) Syntactical.
(d) Lexical.

3. In what century did England replace the "i-sound" with the "oi-sound" in words such as "boy"?
(a) The nineteenth.
(b) The seventeenth.
(c) The sixteenth.
(d) The eighteenth.

4. What was the common, popular American slang word used for Germans during the First World War, according to Mencken?
(a) Hun.
(b) Kraut.
(c) Jerry.
(d) Boche.

5. What name is the Italian "Giuseppe" transformed into?
(a) Joseph.
(b) George.
(c) Jonathon.
(d) Gregory.

6. Which still-popular German given name survives today, with a slight change in spelling, as Mencken reports in Chapter 10.2?
(a) Wilhelm.
(b) Franz.
(c) Hans.
(d) Karl.

7. Which of the following does Mencken not list as a once-slang word turned into one commonly accepted?
(a) Awful.
(b) Nice.
(c) Frugal.
(d) Proposition.

8. Which word do the English always place prior to the proper noun whereas Americans place it after, as Mencken reports at the end of Chapter 10.3?
(a) County.
(b) River.
(c) Street.
(d) Lake.

9. What was the original name of Brooklyn?
(a) Breuckelen.
(b) Brookeville.
(c) Brook Lynne.
(d) Breukwohl.

10. Which 1914 English dictionary made many important concessions to American spellings?
(a) The New English Dictionary.
(b) The Cambridge Fleet Edition.
(c) The Concise Oxford Dictionary.
(d) The London Pocket Dictionary.

11. Who does Mencken quote as saying, "There is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque as in the United States of America"?
(a) Walt Whitman.
(b) Robert Louis Stevenson.
(c) G.K. Chesterton.
(d) Benjamin Franklin.

12. According to the study of E.J. Hills, how many descriptive adjectives are possessed by the average child of two?
(a) 23.
(b) 72.
(c) 59.
(d) 173.

13. In what language does Mencken state the double negative was once "quite respectable?"
(a) Russian.
(b) French.
(c) Spanish.
(d) Anglo-Saxon.

14. For which voiceless consonant is the voiced "d" substituting with growing regularity, according to Mearns?
(a) S.
(b) C.
(c) T.
(d) B.

15. For what word does Mencken say "incidence" is commonly mistaken to be a synonym?
(a) Similarity.
(b) Number.
(c) Happening.
(d) Story.

Short Answer Questions

1. Whom does Mencken quote as saying, at the beginning of Chapter 10.4, "Such a locality as 'the <i>corner of Avenue H and Twenty-third street,</I> is about as distinctly American as Algonquin and Iroquois names like <i>Mississippi</i> and <i>Saratoga</i>"?

2. What language did "ambassador," "ancestor," and "bachelor" come into English from?

3. According to Mencken, which of the following does "one American professor of English" predict will become a spelling form of the future?

4. What is the English equivalent of the American Main Street?

5. Which of the following is often used in England to designate a thoroughfare?

(see the answer keys)

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