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Happy birthday Aiden John Smith!

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Police seeking West Pittston man who allegedly led them on chase

Say so long and good riddance to the SAT&#8217;s abstruse vocabulary words. Uh, we mean difficult words.The brainy bunch at <a href="https://www.collegeboard.org/" target="_blank">the College Board</a> &#8211; responsible for that anxiety-inducing, college-entrance exam known as the SAT &#8211; gave a sendoff this week to the test&#8217;s stodgy format with a farewell gesture perhaps best described as facetious. Uh, we mean funny.The board&#8217;s news release arrived in our email inbox Monday. Written with tongue planted firmly in cheek, the text read, in part, &#8220;On Saturday, Jan. 23, students across the country participated in the terminal transpiration of the SAT in its habituated gestalt.&#8221;It further stated, for readers willing to plod on with or without the aid of Webster&#8217;s unabridged dictionary, &#8220;The new SAT will be more trenchant and pellucid, and the format will no longer pertinaciously reward students who punctiliously engage in the antediluvian praxis of committing idiosyncratic words to memory.&#8221;Translation: The new SAT won&#8217;t quiz students on obscure words. Instead, the test-takers will be challenged to understand a word as used in context.Beginning March 5, other big changes are in store for young people gripping their No. 2 pencils and aiming for admission to their dream colleges. Among the SAT&#8217;s more talked-about revisions for 2016: The redesigned test will include fewer multiple-choice options, four instead of five, and won&#8217;t penalize students for wrong answers. A top score reverts this year to 1,600 after a failed attempt with a scoring scale that maxed out at 2,400.Anyone hoping to improve their performance on the exam can now access the Khan Academy&#8217;s <a href="https://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/new-sat" target="_blank">online test-prep questions</a> and study advice for free.No doubt, even without its arcane words, the SAT will remain a challenging exam. But for those of test-taking age, and well beyond it, the end of what the College Board&#8217;s news release called &#8220;anachronistic verbiage&#8221; comes as a relief.Now, if only certain lawmakers and lawyers would follow suit and drop the grandiloquent language. Know what we mean?

Our Opinion: Goodbye to those head-scratching SAT words; we won’t miss the grandiloquence