Page 354 - Word Power Made Easy: The Complete Handbook for Building a Superior Vocabulary

this largely for your own amusement and not to achieve any professional competence; nor

are you at all interested in monetary rewards. Your artistic e orts are simply a means of
passing time pleasantly.

You are a dilettante.

4. battle-ax

You are a loud-mouthed, shrewish, turbulent woman; you’re quarrelsome and aggressive,
possessing none of those gentle and tender qualities stereotypically associated with
femininity. You’re strong-minded, unyielding, sharp-tongued, and dangerous. You can curse
like a stevedore and yell like a fishwife—and often do.

You are a virago.

5. superpatriot

Anything you own or belong to is better—simply because you own it or belong to it,
although you will be quick to nd more justi able explanations. Your religion, whatever it
may be, is far superior to any other; your political party is the only honest one; your

neighborhood puts all others in the city in the shade; members of your own sex are more
intelligent, more worthy, more emotionally secure, and in every way far better than people
of the opposite sex; your car is faster, more fun to drive, and gets better gas mileage than
any other, no matter in what price range; and of course your country and its customs leave
nothing to be desired, and inhabitants of other nations are in comparison barely civilized.
In short, you are exaggeratedly, aggressively, absurdly, and excessively devoted to your

own affiliations—and you make no bones about advertising such prejudice.

You are a chauvinist.

6. fanatic

You have a one-track mind—and when you’re riding a particular hobby, you ride it hard.

You have such an excessive, all-inclusive zeal for one thing (and it may be your business,
your profession, your husband or wife, your children, your stomach, your money, or
whatever) that your obsession is almost absurd. You talk, eat, sleep that one thing—to the
point where you bore everyone to distraction.

You are a monomaniac.

7. attacker

You are violently against established beliefs, revered traditions, cherished customs—such,
you say, stand in the way of reform and progress and are always based on superstition and