What’s inimical to me
inimical – adjective
- adverse in tendency or effect; unfavorable; harmful: a climate inimical to health.
- unfriendly; hostile: a cold, inimical gaze.
I’ll get to why I’ll never forget the meaning of this word in a little bit.
I took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) twice in middle school, once in 7th grade and once in 8th grade, earning a 1350 and 1450, respectively. This was back when the score was out of 1600 and the average for high schoolers was a fair bit less than my seventh grade score. Most middle schoolers don’t take the SAT, of course, but I was in a special situation. My dad was really pushing me to get experience taking the test so that when I took it when it really mattered, in eleventh grade, I would do well. Also, more urgently, there was an academic summer program I went to (yes, I went to math camp) that had, as an entry requirement for middle schoolers, a certain minimum score on the math segment of the SAT. I did end up making it in.
By eleventh grade, the SAT simply didn’t pose a real challenge to me. I was taking calculus II at the time, and as much as I wouldn’t like to admit it, I would skip to the last problems in the math sections on the practice SATs, which are the hardest, and do them for fun. The SAT only goes up to geometry, and with powerful tools like trigonometry and calculus at my disposal, it wasn’t hard for me. The English section also wasn’t that worrying to me, as I was a huge reader. Since I went to a Magnet high school, I had a long bus ride every morning and every afternoon. I would occupy myself on those bus rides by reading books. Lots and lots of books. So in addition to being a math nerd, I was also a book nerd. Reading lots and lots of books is simply one of the best ways to do well on the English portion of the SAT; you’d be surprised how many new words you pick up simply by analyzing the context.
Despite all these advantages, my parents were still worried about me doing well on the SAT, so they enrolled me in an eight week SAT prep course. It met on Saturday afternoons and each session was four hours long, the first two hours focusing on math and the latter two on English. By the fourth week I was simply skipping the math sessions as they were a waste of my time; I swear I knew more than the teacher. The English sessions were actually somewhat worthwhile, as I expanded my vocabulary and learned useful strategies for defeating analogies.
The day of the test came, and the exam itself seemed to go by in a blur. I remember finishing many sections with a lot of time left on the clock, and very uncharacteristically for me, I went back and studiously checked and re-checked my answers. The math section wasn’t a problem for me at all, as predicted. But I did stumble a bit on one of the problems in one of the English sections. Compared to English, math is small. It’s possible to know every mathematical concept used on the SAT. Bit the potential vocabulary they draw from measures in the tens of thousands, and it’s simply not worthwhile to study every possible word that might show up, as the odds are so low for any given word. One of those words I didn’t know showed up on the exam. That word was inimical.
It was an analogy problem at the end of one of the English sections. I no longer remember what the analogy was, nor what the other four answers were. All I know is that I got it down to a choice of two answers, and not knowing what inimical meant, I guessed incorrectly. I remember walking out of the exam to my mom who was waiting to pick me up. I asked her what inimical meant, and as soon as she told me, I knew I had gotten that question wrong. I didn’t think I got any other question wrong, and remembering what I had seen in the scoring section in the back of the SAT practice book, one wrong answer in an English section yielded a score of 1580. So I announced that I had probably gotten a 1580 on the exam.
And when the results came back a month or two later by mail, that’s exactly what I had gotten.
So you see, the word inimical is itself inimical to me, and I will always remember the definition of that blasted word until my very last days.
