Idioms for Reading Comp: The Other Meaning of “Save”
We find that there are some words that people never look up because they are “unknown unknowns” — that is, you don’t even know what you don’t know!
Did you know that even the simple word save has another meaning?
Save “ but or except. As a verb, of course, save means keep safe, store up, set aside. But as a preposition or conjunction, save can be used as follows:
All of the divisions of the company are profitable save the movie-rental division. (This means that the movie-rental division was not profitable.)
He would have been elected President, save for the scandal that derailed his campaign at the last minute. (Here, save means except.)
For more on Idioms for Reading Comprehension, see Chapter 5, “Idioms and Metaphorical Language” in Manhattan GRE’s Text Completion and Sentence Equivalence Strategy Guide.