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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In what sort of languages are double negatives "perfectly allowable"?
(a) Romance.
(b) Asiatic.
(c) Semitic.
(d) Teutonic.

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

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

4. Which of the following does names, used for a settlement, Mencken not list as bespattering the land?
(a) Washington.
(b) Lafayette.
(c) Jefferson.
(d) Madison.

5. Who was responsible for the endowment to the Simplified Spelling Board?
(a) Horace Hart.
(b) Andrew Carnegie.
(c) Noah Webster.
(d) Adrian Knox.

6. How many soldiers' names were presented to the House by Mr. Mondell in 1919?
(a) 27.
(b) 43.
(c) 102.
(d) 182.

7. To what does Mencken ascribe the inflection of English adjectives?
(a) Comparison.
(b) Emphasis.
(c) Frivolity.
(d) Convention.

8. In what year did Noah Webster die?
(a) 1843.
(b) 1799.
(c) 1898.
(d) 1912.

9. What principle of spelling was behind much of Webster's theory concerning the simplification of spelling?
(a) Convention.
(b) Phonetics.
(c) Flexibility.
(d) Vowel accentuation.

10. What is the longest list of spelling changes from English to American that Mencken gives in Chapter 8.1?
(a) The -or/-our distinction.
(b) Miscellaneous differences.
(c) The omission of a redundant -e.
(d) The change of diphthongs into plain words.

11. What is the name of the professor who advocates the assimilation and alteration of the spelling and accentuation of foreign words?
(a) Louise Pound.
(b) Brander Matthews.
(c) Nora Helmar.
(d) Edmund Gosse.

12. Lounsbury is reported as saying that, "The history of language, when looked at from the purely grammatical point of view, is little else than the history of" what?
(a) Innovations.
(b) Aberrations.
(c) Regulations.
(d) Corruptions.

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

14. What does Mencken say that a proper understanding of words and their meanings will enable their speaker to do, in Chapter 11.1?
(a) Mingle slang and proper speech effortlessly.
(b) Alter the course of language.
(c) Create new slang all the time.
(d) Speak without ever using slang.

15. What purpose does the double negative primarily serve?
(a) Confusion.
(b) Reinforcement.
(c) Rhetorical circuitry.
(d) Syntactical compactness.

Short Answer Questions

1. 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?

2. What was the common, popular American slang word used for Germans during the First World War, according to Mencken?

3. Whose "gaping maw" often spoils an "apt and ingenious neologism," according to Mencken in Chapter 11.1?

4. Which of the following is not one of the minor differences Mencken lists in Chapter 8.7?

5. In what year did the National Education Association withdraw from the campaign for simplified spelling?

(see the answer keys)

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