words words words

So I'm studying for the GREs. I took a practice exam to see where I need to study and the results were (unsurprisingly) that I rock at the quantitative sections (read: math and interpreting graphs) and kind of fail at verbal (except reading comprehension- I'm a good reader!). Anyway, to remedy this, I've been studying flashcards, first some handmade ones but now some actual ones (thanks Colin!).

Now a good portion of the words I know or at least have a general idea of what the word can be used for. There are a lot that I'm working on learning, but sometimes I wonder the choice of including these words. I mean, "distaff" for instance. Who uses that word? It sounds like a disease or something. And "canard." Canard is French for duck and that's really as much information on that word my brain seems to want to remember.

Then again, they used the word "chicanery" in an episode of The Mentalist and I only truly knew what it meant because of the GRE. And "nadir" was in Thursday's crossword (clue: rock bottom- I'm still working on that crossword by the way, Papa).

I guess my main beef with the GREs is that I could have studied and in all likelihood done just as well on them after high school as I will now. Maybe my writing has improved since high school, but not my ability to learn words or solve the level of math problems I'll need to solve.