Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I found a couple of interesting word-quizzes yesterday. The first one is about political word origins and is pretty straight-forward. We do have some pretty strange words in our political discourse. I got seven right out of ten.

The second quiz is a fairly devilish word-association thing. Pairs of words are given, and it is your task to decide if they mean roughly the same or the opposite. My score was 151. There were a lot of words here that I had never seen before, so I'm thinking that around twenty or so of my right answers are the product of sheer guesswork. I'm also of the opinion, though, that while I might not be able to always give a meaning of some of the more obscure words here when they're simply placed on the page before me, I can usually glean from context clues what the words mean. Words are meant to be used in sentences, which is why spelling-bee participants will often ask to hear the word as used in a sentence.