I think I could have gotten it, being fairly word-oriented, but I made 
the mistake of continuing to read the other posts. 'Posthaste' indeed 
would have been the tipoff for me, as it is a word still used in 
fiction, which is what I used to read before datasheets ;). 'Card' has 
a  lot of possible prefixes, 'postbag' and 'postbox' are not really 
used in the USA, as was observed, and 'postcode' is old usage for 'zip 
code'. This is definitely more a test of word knowledge than any kind 
of intelligence, IMHO. My (Dutch) mother used to do the crosswords that 
frustrated me, despite her not having the benefit of my much vaster 
experience of American English. As an exercise, I recently tried to do 
the word puzzles in 'The Nation' magazine, which are much harder than 
regular crosswords, and I was able to learn to do some of them after a 
lot of struggle. It required a knowledge of English usage, a feeling 
for puns, reading the rules of their website, and a fair amount of 
general knowledge (e.g. names of authors and their books). Some of 
these may be somewhat correlated with 'general intelligence' and that 
may or may not be correlated with what IQ tests measure.

BTW, 'bijvoegilijk naamwoord'  is 'adjective' in English. 'Adverb' is 
'bijwoord' (I had to look these up in my Dutch dictionary).


Rolf Levenbach
platypus3@verizon.net


On Mar 22, 2006, at 4:02 PM, Olin Lathrop wrote:

> Russell McMahon wrote:
>> xxxxhaste is the big give away I
>> think as "haste" is a rare enough word in general usage that any fancy
>> usage of it tends to be memorable.
>
> I actually briefly thought of posthaste for that reason, but dismissed 
> post
> as the prefix because it didn't make sense for several of the other 
> words.
> Did any americans not that familiar with UK english get this question
> correctly?
>
>
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