The adjective eager suggests desire and enthusiasm tinged with impatience. Keen carries a sense of zest and active, alert desire—one might even call it sharpness. The idea of sharpness slices through all uses of the word keen. A keen razor is a finely sharpened blade. Keen satire is sharp and biting, and a keen mind is one of great acumen or incisiveness. As a synonym for eager, the sharpness of keen turns up as a pointed enthusiasm. To say that you’re not keen on something is an understated way to say that you don’t look forward to that thing, or that you have no enthusiasm for it whatsoever.

Something that is obvious is easily seen or recognized. Something that is conspicuous is so glaringly apparent, it is hard to ignore. This term skews negative in usage, describing things that attract attention for the wrong reasons. A conspicuous absence of information, for instance, is a lack or deficiency of material that was needed or expected. Conspicuous consumption is the public enjoyment of possessions that are known to be costly so that one’s ability to pay for such things is flaunted.

Today’s the day! That is, it’s the perfect day for clarifying the difference between choose and elect! To choose something is to select it from a number of possibilities. This is a very common and general verb that is unlikely to call to mind any specific situation or action. The verb elect, on the other hand, suggests the formal action of voting someone into office. Elect does have more general senses referring to picking something out (a first-year college student might elect one class over another to satisfy a requirement), but as a member of the civically inclined word family including electoral and election, the primary meaning elect calls to mind relates to governmental processes.