Make Your Point: ASSAY

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pronounce ASSAY:

ASS ay

connect this word to others:

The word assay, meaning "to test, or to analyze a substance," comes from the Latin exigere, "to test, to try out, to force, or to drive out." That means assay is cousins with other words that have to do with testing things out, or forcing them to happen or to move, like exact, examine, essay, exig___cy ("a situation that needs urgent action"), and exig___s ("too small, too few, or not enough, as if most of it has been driven out").

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definition:

"Assay" traces back to the Late Latin word exagium, meaning "a weight, or the act of weighing," and further back to exigere, meaning "to measure, to test, or to try." In English, we first used "assay" to mean "to test the strength or excellence of," as in "They assayed their armor."

Over time, "assay" took on many other specific meanings, including "to test the purity or strength of some substance by using chemicals." That meaning has stuck around.

So, today, to assay something is to analyze it to see how strong or pure it is, as if it's a precious metal or a potent chemical.

grammatical bits:

Part of speech:

Verb, the transitive kind: "The experience assayed her character."

Also a noun, the countable kind: "The experience was an assay of her character."

Other forms:

The plural noun is "assays."

And the other verb forms are "assayed" and "assaying."

how to use it:

When you want to make some test, challenge, or analysis sound scientifically precise, instead of calling it a "test" or a "challenge" or an "analysis," call it an "assay:" "The book is an assay of the president's first term."

Or, say that someone assays something: "The book assays the president's first term."

examples:

"The results of globalisation – the nature of immigration, the fluidity of capital – have jolted countries' long-held beliefs of what they are, and confused the idea of what a nation state is meant to be. Like teenagers entering a new school, regions and countries – from Lipetsk to the US – feel compelled to assay their identity, change it up, build it out."
— Samanth Subramanian, The Guardian, 7 November 2017

"Even Lincoln felt profoundly that he was subject to history, not sovereign over it. 'I claim not to have controlled events,' he wrote to one correspondent, 'but confess plainly that events have controlled me.' Lincoln, in other words, was essential, tapped by fate for a specific test — yet the outcome of this assay was not predetermined. He could have wavered, flagged, fallen short."
— David Von Drehle, Washington Post, 23 December 2022

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If you have any questions about this term, please message me at Liesl@HiloTutor.com.

study it:

Explain the meaning of "assay" without saying "evaluate" or "analyze."

try it out:

Fill in the blanks: "(Someone) assays (certain things): (looking closely at them or evaluating them in some way)."

Example 1: "Mostly in my imagination, my peers in middle school were assaying my outfits: making sure the jeans were baggiest at the ankle, checking that I'd layered a spaghetti-strapped tank top only over a form-fitting white cap-sleeve tee, approving of horizontal stripes but gasping at vertical ones."

Example 2: "He trained as a conservator of paintings, but now he assays them: picks out their chemical constituents, inspects pigments and binders, peers under their washes of colour."
— Samanth Subramanian, The Guardian, 15 June 2018

before you review, play:

Try to spend 20 seconds or more on the game below. Don’t skip straight to the review—first, let your working memory empty out.

Our game for this month is "The LOL Is In the Details."

I'll give you a vague version of a quote from a funny writer or speaker, then prompt you to liven it up with detail. To see the original quote, scroll all the way down.

Here's an example:

"Don't order any of the faerie food… It tends to make humans a little crazy. One minute you’re snacking, the next minute you’re doing something insane."

Snacking on what? Doing what?

You might say, "One minute you’re sampling a mushroom tart, the next minute you’re doing the Macarena."

And the writer's original version was "One minute you're munching on a faerie plum, the next minute you're running naked down Madison Avenue with antlers on your head."
— Cassandra Clare, City of Bones, 2007

Try this one today:

"Jesus, what’s a girl to do? This boy can barely spell anything correctly."

Spell what?

review this word:

1. The opposite of ASSAYED could be

A. UNFAZED.
B. UNDIMMED.
C. UNTESTED.

2. True to the metaphor implied by the word "assay," David Von Drehle wrote: "The Information Age is not especially conducive to good information. New technologies make it much easier to collect and distribute information. But assaying information — weighing it, analyzing it, separating _____ — still depends on old-fashioned human judgment. It takes time."

A. the gold from the pyrite
B. the fat from the muscle
C. the wheat from the chaff

a final word:

I hope you're enjoying Make Your Point. It's made with love.

I'm Liesl Johnson, a reading and writing tutor on a mission to explore, illuminate, and celebrate words.

From my blog:
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A disclaimer: When I write definitions, I use plain language and stick to the words' common, useful applications. If you're interested in authoritative and multiple definitions of words, I encourage you to check a dictionary. Also, because I'm American, I stick to American English when I share words' meanings, usage, and pronunciations; these elements sometimes vary across world Englishes.

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