Test The Nation: Language

I got 62/70, which is only 88%. I'd hoped to do better.

Spelling, Eh: 4/5
Modern English: 4/4
Everyday Mistakes: 10/10
Made in Canada: 11/12
Nursery Rhymes: 3/4
Euphemisms: 5/5
Word Origins: 3/8
Language Terms: 4/4
Txt Talk: 5/5
Plurals: 4/4
The Arts: 3/3
What The...?: 2/2
Expressions: 4/4

The interesting thing about the spelling category is that I'm not necessarily that good at spotting common misspellings. I tend to double-check things with spell-check and google rather than knowing every spelling off-hand. Thing is, my fingers know how to spell more words than my brain does. If I attempt to type something, I will type it properly (barring typoes), but I can't necessarily rattle it off spelling-bee style.

I'm surprised I got so many right in the Made In Canada category, because I was guessing at everything. I don't actually know that many regionalisms.

The problem with the nursery rhyme category was that I didn't know what a tuffet is. That category is questionable though, because it was more about common conceptions of what the nursery rhymes are about rather than what they're actually about. For example, Snopes says the idea that Ring Around the Rosie is about the plague is false. If it actually is false, I don't think a person should be faulted for not knowing it's allegedly about the plague.

The word origins were almost entirely Aboriginal, and almost entirely place names. I see their point and I'm not saying there's no place for Aboriginal word origins or place name origins in this test, but I think to truly test people's in-depth knowledge of English, you'd have to test their understanding of more common etymology, from French and German and Greek and Latin, and of everyday words, especially words for which the etymology is significant. I did find it strange that they asked at the beginning how many languages you speak when knowledge of other languages had so little influence on so many of the questions.

It would be interesting to see a bilingual version of this quiz. It would also be interesting to see how people could do if they were allowed to research. My translation training focused more on teaching me how to quickly and reliably find out stuff I don't know rather than on knowing absolutely everything, and I am absolutely certain I could have gotten every question correct if I'd had, say, one minute or 90 seconds to research each question. So I'd be interested in knowing how this compares with other people who don't have this training and experience.