Week 10_ vocabulary (children literature)

1.      munificent, adjective: very generous.

Another munificent friend has given me the most splendid reclining chair conceivable.

-- George Eliot, Letters

2.      indolent, adjective: lazy; inactive.

We worked very hard--at least Iris did; I was more naturally indolent.

-- John Bayley, Elegy for Iris

3.      intransigent, adjective: uncompromising.

Sometimes I was intransigent, and proud of it. At other times I seemed to myself to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without will.

-- Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir

4.      tortuous, adjective: marked by repeated turns and bends.

Thus in the 1970s Terry Erwin of the Smithsonian Institution anaesthetized and then counted all the species of beetle in just one tree in Panama, perceived that the number of unknown species far outweighed the ones that had previously been identified, and through a sequence of reasoning that may seem a trifle tortuous but is widely agreed to be reasonable, calculated that the true number of all species on Earth is probably nearer to 30 million.

-- Colin Tudge, The Variety of Life

5.      paucity, noun: fewness; insufficiency.

From paucity of evidence, we are unable to measure them with precision.

-- Henry Thomas Buckle, History of Civilization in England

6.      autodidact, noun: one who is self-taught.

He is our ultimate autodidact, a man who made himself from nothing into a lawyer, a legislator -- a president.

-- Kevin Baker, "Log Cabin Values", New York Times, April 2, 2000

7.      fatuous, adjective: inanely foolish; stupid; also, illusory.

No enquiry, however fatuous or ill informed, failed to receive his full attention, nor was any irrelevant personal information treated as less than engrossing.

-- Michael Palin, Hemingway's Chair

8.      complement, noun: something that fills up or completes.

There was also a tennis court, a riding stable, a five-car garage, and a full complement of servants.

-- Carol Felsenthal, Citizen Newhouse

9.      taciturn, adjective: not inclined to talk.

In the company of even his close literary and political friends he was shy if not taciturn.

-- "Passionate voice of the press", Irish Times, November 4, 1997

10.  en masse, adverb: all together; as a whole.

Following news of her husband's demise, Mary O'Sullivan united her children in London, and in the fall of 1827 they moved en masse to New York.

-- Edward L. Widmer, Young America

11.  confluence, noun: a flowing or coming together.

A remarkable confluence of technological and economic forces is enabling women to join the paid labor force around the world.

-- Helen E. Fisher, The First Sex

12.  maudlin, adjective: excessively sentimental.

He was a bad drunk and became maudlin and weepy and would often have to be carried home by his friends.

-- Barry Miles, Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats

13.  enervate, verb: to weaken.

Beatriz de Ahumada soldiered on to produce nine more children, a tour of duty that left her enervated and worn.

-- Cathleen Medwick, Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul

14.  recondite, adjective: difficult to understand.

And his fondness for stopping his readers short in their tracks with evidence of his recondite vocabulary is wonderfully irritating.

-- "Books of the Times", New York Times, February 23, 1951

15.  paroxysm, noun: an outburst; a fit.

Mrs. Bumble, seeing at a glance that the decisive moment had now arrived, and that a blow struck for mastership on one side or another, must necessarily be final and conclusive, dropped into a chair, and with a loud scream that Mr. Bumble was a hard-hearted brute, fell into a paroxysm of tears.

-- Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

16.  copious, adjective: large in quantity; also, affording an abundant supply.

She thought about the planets all day and wrote copious odes to them.

-- Paul West, Life With Swan

17.  exalt, verb: to praise, glorify, or honor.

Other cultures worship twins as a divine gift; for instance, the voodoo practitioners of West Africa and Haiti exalt twins as supernatural beings with a single soul, who are to be revered and feared.

-- Lawrence Wright, Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are

18.  erroneous, adjective: containing or characterized by error.

History shows that even the greatest minds can construct theories that work but that have one minor flaw--they are completely erroneous.

-- Brian L. Silver, The Ascent of Science

19.  prescience, noun: knowledge of events before they take place.

But you could not fault his prescience in 1980 when he [Arthur Seldon] wrote: "China will go capitalist. Soviet Russia will not survive the century. Labour as we know it will never rule again. Socialism is an irrelevance."

-- "Prophet of privatisation puts money on Major - well, £2.50 of it", Electronic Telegraph, March 28, 1997

20.  ineluctable, adjective: impossible to avoid or evade.

California's vision of itself as a car culture grew out of the impracticality of mass transit in reaching most of its scenic wonders, the innate restlessness of its inhabitants and the ineluctable attraction of an open road.

-- "From the Land of Private Freeways Comes Car Culture Shock", New York Times, October 16, 1997

21.  obdurate, adjective: hardened in feelings or in wrongdoing; unyielding.

The obdurate conscience of the old sinner.

-- Sir Walter Scott, Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft

22.  banal, adjective: devoid of freshness or originality; hackneyed; trite

This sounds almost banal, and in fact it has become banal, thanks to the frog-like perspective of Darwin and such like.

-- Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye, 1939

23.  affable, adjective: easy to speak to; also, gracious.

Johnny's father, while strict with his children, usually was affable and relaxed.

-- Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams

24.  exacerbate, verb: to aggravate; to make worse.

By the 1920s a stubborn agricultural depression . . . badly exacerbated the problems of the countryside.

-- David M. Kennedy, Freedom From Fear

25.  noisome, adjective: offensive or disgusting; also, harmful; unwholesome.

The body politic produces noisome and unseemly substances, among which are politicians.

-- P. J. O'Rourke, "No Apparent Motive", The Atlantic, November 2002