Week 8_ vocabulary (children literature)

1.      quash, verb: to annul; also, to crush; to subdue.

The Shelby Globe attributed her death to acute heart failure and yellow jaundice and did its best to quash a curious town rumor that had her being poisoned by eating oyster sandwiches.

-- Tim Page, Dawn Powell: A Biography

2.      meretricious, adjective: tawdry.

Let us be thought over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap and meretricious.

-- Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

3.      bumptious, adjective: crudely, presumptuously, or noisily self-assertive.

Wells did not meet his father until he was an adult, by which time he had developed his own blunt, sometimes bumptious personality.

-- George Vecsey, "An Outsider Who Became an Insider", New York Times, October 7, 1998

4.      laudable, adjective: praiseworthy; commendable.

The second sense in which we are feminist researchers comes from our belief that equity between boys and girls, men and women, is a laudable goal.

-- Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins (editors), From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games

5.      inamorata, noun: a woman whom one is in love with.

There are cynical experts on romanticism who counsel one to switch from one young inamorata to another in the nick of time.

-- Paul West, Life With Swan

6.      penchant, noun: a strong liking.

Field, in his personal comportment, maintained a penchant for austerity, a contempt for frivolity, and a "steely cold" disdain for any decision not based on fundamental business principles.

-- Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul

7.  scion, noun: a descendant; an heir.

Sassoon, scion of a famously wealthy Jewish banking family, had never needed to earn his living.

-- Philip Hoare, Oscar Wilde's Last Stand

8.  bandog, noun: a large and fierce dog.

The keeper entered leading his bandog, a large bloodhound, tied in a leam, or band, from which he takes his name.

-- Sir W. Scott

9.  multifarious, adjective: having great diversity or variety.

Men's opinions, accordingly, on what is laudable or blamable, are affected by all the multifarious causes which influence their wishes in regard to the conduct of others, and which are as numerous as those which determine their wishes on any other subject.

-- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

10.  sublunary, adjective: situated beneath the moon; terrestrial.

May the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.

-- Samuel Johnson, Preface to the Dictionary of the English Language

11.  ebullient, adjective: high-spirited.

The glasses he wore for astigmatism gave him a deceptively clerkish appearance, for he had an ebullient, gregarious personality, a hot temper, and an outsized imagination.

-- Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life

12.  Brobdingnagian, adjective: gigantic; enormous.

The venture capital business has a size problem. A monstrous, staggering, stupefying one. Brobdingnagian even.

-- Russ Mitchell, "Too Much Ventured Nothing Gained", Fortune, November 11, 2002

13.  extant, adjective: still existing.

The fossil record shows clearly that ancient life was very different from extant life.

-- Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle

14.  verdant, adjective: green.

Dry as the region just outside the delta may be, it would still be covered with grasses, yellowish in the dry season, verdant in the wet.

-- Niles Eldredge, Life in the Balance

15.  Whig, noun: a friend and supporter of the American Revolution.

When the Whigs of America are thus multiplied, let the Princes of the earth tremble in their palaces.

-- Samuel Johnson in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson

16.  trepidation, noun: a state of dread or alarm; apprehension.

The ghost then disappeared, and as soon as Grosse could recover himself from the extreme trepidation, . . . he looked about him, and finding himself alone, he exclaimed, "Ghost or devil, I will soon prove whether or not thou liest!"

-- Ernest Rhys (editor), The Haunters & the Haunted

17.  torrid, adjective: drying or scorching with heat; burning; parching.

Cyrene's torrid soil

-- Milton

18.  gnomic, adjective: uttering, containing, or characterized by maxims.

They consisted of strange, short, sometimes witty, sometimes gnomic, often semiautobiographical essays about architecture.

-- Geoff Nicholson, Female Ruins

19.  comity, noun: a state of mutual harmony, friendship, and respect.

In Athens last week, E.U. leaders offered a picture of comity as they formally signed accession treaties with 10 new members.

-- James Graff, "Can France Put a Cork In It?", Time Europe, April 28, 2003

20.  tyro, noun: a novice.

He was a sensitive, fine soul alert to the pleasures of being green, a tyro, an amateur, unwilling to close his mind before it had been tempted.

-- Paul West, Sporting With Amaryllis

21.  avarice, noun: an excessive desire of gain; greediness.

In the words of Augustine, a propertyless society was possible only in Paradise, because it demanded perfection-the kind of perfection that since the Fall was beyond the reach of most of humanity. Furthermore, possessions were ethically neutral and became evil only if they gave rise to avarice.

-- Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom

22.  eke, verb: to gain or supplement with great effort or difficulty.

Although life was hard it was not unendurable, and the rugged and resourceful villagers eked out a living on the thin crust of the soil.

-- Suheil Bushrui and Joe Jenkins, "Kahlil Gibran: Man and Poet"

23.  tittle-tattle, adjective: idle, trifling talk.

It is better even to have a useless hobby than to be a tittle-tattler and a busybody.

-- Samuel Smiles, Life and Labour

24.  bellwether, noun: a leader or leading indicator.

Before that election, Maine's proud citizens had fancied their state to be a sort of bellwether, a notion embodied in the saying "As Maine goes, so goes the nation."

-- Robert Shogan, The Fate of the Union

25.  torpid, adjective: dull; sluggish; apathetic.

For more than twenty years--all my adult life--I have lived here: my great weight sunk, torpid in the heat, into this sagged chair on my rooftop patio.

-- Peggy Payne, Sister India