Week 9_ vocabulary (children literature)

1.      grok, verb: to understand.

The electeds can say "I feel your pain" when the teleprompter tells them to, but our current existential crisis isn't something they grok.

-- Reverend Billy Talen, Alternet, February 27, 2010

2.      ameliorate, verb: to make or grow better.

In the socially fluid and (until the crash of 1837) economically expansive 1830s, the legislature frequently appropriated public money to investigate social problems, forestall dependency, and ameliorate human suffering.

-- Elisabeth Gitter, The Imprisoned Guest

3.      bestow, verb: to give or confer.

He bestowed on him a pension of a hundred crowns a year.

-- John Richard Green, Short History of the English People

4.      comestible, adjective: suitable to be eaten.

This rare comestible calls for specially designed platters, holders, and forks, but how well worth their acquisition!

-- Samuel Chamberlain, Clémentine in the Kitchen

5.      requisite, adjective: required; indispensable.

In this way, 2,156 buildings were laboriously hoisted, a quarter of an inch at a turn, until they reached the requisite height and new foundations could be built beneath them.

-- Cornelia Dean, Against the Tide

6.      prolix, adjective: wordy.

It was a cumbersome book, widely criticized for being prolix in style and maddeningly circular in argument.

-- Simon Winchester, "Word Imperfect", The Atlantic, May 2001

7.      sobriquet, noun: a nickname.

There was an omnivorous intellect that won him the family sobriquet of Walking Encyclopedia.

-- Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian

8.      Zeitgeist, noun: the spirit of the time.

The best writers of that predawn era were originals who had the zeitgeist by the tail.

-- Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The First Century

9.      numismatics, noun: the collection and study of coins.

Numismatics...is, in the main, an auxiliary to the knowledge of the trade and mutual intercourse of the ancients.

-- J. Leitch

10.  palpable, adjective: plain; distinct; obvious.

A sense of devastation from the attacks remains palpable, but so too is a sense of rejuvenation.

-- "Onwards and upwards", The Economist, May 23, 2002

11.  listless, adjective: having no desire or inclination.

If you appear downcast or depressed, or are unresponsive to the interviewer's questions or listless in your approach, you will rule yourself out of consideration for that job.

-- "Good first impressions vital in interviews", Chicago Sun-Times, May 2, 1999

12.  antediluvian, adjective: extremely old.

The other thing that almost always goes with these myths is the notion of an antediluvian civilisation -- something which existed before the flood and was destroyed by it.

-- Graham Hancock, "Castles in the sea", The Guardian, February 6, 2002

13.  melee, noun: a confused conflict.

In another incident, two staff members required stitches from a melee that ensued from their attempts to confiscate a razor blade found in the sock of a boy who had just arrived from another facility.

-- James Garbarino, Lost Boys

14.  genial, adjective: sympathetically cheerful and cheering; kindly.

She, like he, like all beings in this happy valley with its genial clime, goes always naked, stark staring, as someone's said, wearing nothing daylong but the shells and beads braided into her black hair.

-- Robert Coover, Ghost Town

15.  raucous, adjective: unpleasantly loud and harsh.

Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads, Steering north with raucous cry.

-- "Poems", Ralph Waldo Emerson

16.  aberrant, adjective: abnormal.

But I could never accept the aberrant dictates of socialist realism which ruled out all mystery and turned literary activity into a propaganda exercise.

-- Mario Vargas Llosa, Making Waves

17.  diffident, adjective: bashful or unassertive.

Minny was too delicate and diffident to ask her cousin outright to take her to Europe.

-- Brooke Allen, "Borrowed Lives", New York Times, May 16, 1999

18.  juju, noun: an object superstitiously believed to embody magical powers.

'You ever heard of juju?'

Skyler shook his head.

'Magic. You talk about this and it'll be the last talkin' you do. You'll just open your mouth and nothin' will come out'.

-- John Darnton, The Experiment

19.  chagrin, noun: acute vexation or embarrassment.

He noted with chagrin how little hair clung to his head.

-- John Marks, The Wall

20.  métier, noun: an occupation, especially in which one excels.

The pairing of Maynard and Salinger -- the writer whose métier is autobiography and the writer who's so private he won't even publish -- was an unlikely one.

-- Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Cult of Joyce Maynard", New York Times Magazine, September 6, 1998

21.  facile, adjective: easily done or performed.

This is a very facile sort of speculation not supported by the facts or by common sense.

-- Roberto González Echevarría, The Pride of Havana

22.  perforce, adverb: by necessity.

It will be an astonishing sight, should it come to pass, and even those of us who have followed every twist and turn of this process will perforce rub our eyes.

-- "Unionists sit tight as the poker game nears its climax", Irish Times, July 10, 1999

23.  evanescent, adjective: fleeting.

The Pen which gives. . . permanence to the evanescent thought of a moment.

-- Horace Smith, Tin Trumpet

24.  quotidian, adjective: occurring daily; also, ordinary.

She also had a sense of fun that was often drummed out under the dull, quotidian beats of suburban life.

-- Meg Wolitzer, Surrender, Dorothy

25.  specious, adjective: apparently right but not so in reality.

A specious theory is confuted by this free and perfect experiment.

-- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire