Week 7_ vocabulary (children literature)

1.          Subterfuge, noun: a deceptive device or stratagem.

In the end, however, all the stealth and subterfuge were for naught, as the young publicity agent couldn't keep the secret.

-- Larry Tye, The Father of Spin

2.          Kismet, noun: destiny; fate.

It's pure kismet when these two find each other.

-- Janet Maslin, "The Mighty': Talents to Make Buddies -- Walking and Wisecracking", New York Times, October 9, 1998

3.          Turpitude, noun: baseness; depravity.

They were not his misdeeds, his turpitudes; she accused him of nothing--that is, of but one thing, which was not a crime.

-- Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

4.          Ephemeral, adjective: lasting a very short time.

Success is very ephemeral. You depend entirely on the desire of others, which makes it difficult to relax.

-- Eva Green

5.      inveigle, verb: to persuade or obtain by ingenuity or flattery.

Once a soft touch for these ragged moralists who inveigled her into sparing them her change, Agnes began to cross the road, begging for some change in her circumstances.

-- Rachel Cusk, Saving Agnes

6.      portentous, adjective: foreboding; ominous.

This victory is without doubt a very special and portentous gift of the gods, she said, "for I believe that there now stands before you the one leader who is the single most qualified to lead us to the peace we long for."

-- Seth Mydans, "Wounded Sri Lankan Sees 'Gift of Gods' in Re-election.", New York Times, December 23, 1999

7.      facetious, adjective: playfully jocular; humorous.

J. K. Morley was being both serious and facetious when he claimed that "the world's greatest water power is woman's tears."

-- Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears

8.      deign, verb: to condescend.

Not until I pour vodka on his shirt does he deign to acknowledge my existence.

-- Jay McInerney, Model Behavior

9.      restive, adjective: resisting control; stubborn.

He proved as ready a scholar as he had been indocile and restive to the pedant who held the office of his tutor.

-- William Godwin, Caleb Williams

10.  schadenfreude, noun: a malicious satisfaction in the misfortunes of others.

That the report of Sebastian Imhof's grave illness might also have been tinged with Schadenfreude appears not to have crossed Lucas's mind.

-- Steven Ozment, Flesh and Spirit

11.  pari passu, adverb: without partiality; equably; fairly.

But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum—which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing—stood in the way of all that.

-- Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge, 1886

12.  mawkish, adjective: sickly or excessively sentimental.

Joe DiMaggio, who died this year to often mawkish eulogies and overwrought sociology, was an ancestor of the current four: driven, selfish, unidimensional in his playing days.

-- Robert Lipsyte, "Time for Sports Heroes to Start Acting in a Heroic Way.", New York Times, August 22, 1999

13.  panache, noun: dash or flamboyance in manner or style.

Although Black didn't have many friends and was not among the school's leaders, he was likeable, had panache, and his contemptuous tirades were rarely taken at face value.

-- Richard Siklos, Shades of Black: Conrad Black and the World's Fastest Growing Press Empire

14.  adventitious, adjective: added extrinsically; not essentially inherent.

I want first to argue that Nietzsche's contempt for democracy was an adventitious extra, inessential to his overall philosophical outlook.

-- Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism"

15.  kvetch, verb: to complain habitually.

Time for my biennial kvetch about the West End theatre.

-- Simon Hoggart, "Hose bans, petrol mania: saying 'don't panic' always triggers chaos", The Guardian, November 4, 2000

16.  pejorative, adjective: disparaging; belittling.

Welfare state is now, even for the Labour party whose grand historic achievement it was, obscurely shameful. A pejorative for our times.

-- John Sutherland, "How the potent language of civic life was undermined", The Guardian, March 20, 2001

17.  cognoscente, noun: a person with special knowledge.

However, I thought it well to acquaint myself with the latest scientific thinking, so as not to write a tale that would embarrass me among the cognoscenti.

-- Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance

18.  alacrity, noun: a cheerful readiness, willingness, or promptness.

So, I am sure that I was thrilled when I got the letter offering me the fellowship and equally sure that I wrote back to accept with alacrity.

-- Joan L. Richards, Angles of Reflection

19.  bravura, noun: a showy display.

But it was not just the bravura of his self-expression that gave him such a hold on his contemporaries.

-- Peter Ackroyd, "Oscar Wilde: Comedy as Tragedy,", New York Times, November 1, 1987

20.  vivify, verb: to endue with life; to enliven.

Stories not only provide context for statistical statements but can illustrate and vivify them as well.

-- John Allen Paulos, Once Upon a Number

21.  sonorous, adjective: yielding sound; impressive in sound.

Tecumseh spoke fluently in the Shawnee tongue, adding weight to his emphatic and sonorous words with elegant gestures.

-- John Sugden, Tecumseh: A Life

22.  anathema, adjective: a curse; a person or thing cursed, or intensely disliked.

Academies, the argument went, were anathema to creativity.

-- Deborah Solomon, "How to Succeed In Art", New York Times, June 27, 1999

23.  laconic, adjective: using or marked by the use of a minimum of words.

In the laconic language of the sheriff department's report,there was "no visible sign of life."

-- David Wise, Cassidy's Run

24.  deleterious, adjective: harmful.

Heat, especially year-round heat, has an even more deleterious consequence: it encourages the proliferation of life forms hostile to man.

-- David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

25.  platitude, noun: a banal, trite, or stale thought or remark.

Yet a curious thing happens in this book: Whatever promise it offers of satire and enlightened vision dissipates into cliche and platitude.

-- Edward Rothstein, "Against Galactic Rhetoric", New York Times, April 3, 1983