FAMILY : An Emboldened Vocabulary Lesson

Looking for a way to augment your vocabulary?

Well, here is a novel approach: A mystery story, at once whimsical and elucidating, filled with hundreds of SAT examiners’ favorite test words.

It’s “Tooth and Nail,” Harcourt Brace & Co.’s latest guide to the Scholastic Aptitude Test. Touted as “a terrific test preparation tool and a mesmerizing mystery,” the book is a benign enough tale of veteran SAT-takers at a mythical college in the middle of Iowa who find themselves in a quagmire of Shakespearean serendipity.

Here’s how it works: Every boldfaced word (boldface is dark type, like this) is an SAT word. Boldfacing is the authors’ subtle way of calling special words to young readers’ attention without disrupting the flow of the story.

Peopled with stalwart Englishmen and toady dotards, the 366-page tome--including glossary--is understandably overrun with some fairly ostentatious allusions. But, hey, isn’t that the point--or shall we say, raison d’etre--of such a book?

Hoping to turn the 1.3 million high school students who take the SAT each year into perspicacious paragons of prose, the $10 paperback is amusingly overwritten by Brooklyn educator Joseph Elliot and San Diego linguist Charles Harrington Elster, who also wrote “Is There A Cow in Moscow?”

And, no, Spiro Agnew had nothing to do with it.