Week 12_ vocabulary (children literature)

1.      misnomer, noun: a misnaming.

Copy cat is a misnomer because cats never copy anybody.

-- Carl Van Vechten, The Tiger in the House

2.      lackadaisical, adjective: lacking spirit or liveliness.

Drowsy from the heat and from fatigue, he dozed to the steady lackadaisical clips of the mule's shoes.

-- Patricia Powell, The Pagoda

3.      hauteur, noun: haughtiness; arrogance.

My silence, I hoped, would be taken as expressive of the hauteur of a man who was above it all -- a man with a mission, in fact, a mission authorized from somewhere on high.

-- Jeffrey Tayler, Facing the Congo

4.      skulk, verb: to hide in a sneaking manner.

He was forced to creep and skulk into every place for fear of being taken and hanged.

-- Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxoniensus

5.      voluble, adjective: characterized by a ready flow of speech.

Rostow was voluble, exuberant and full of good and sometimes foolish ideas.

-- Kai Bird, The Color of Truth

6.      ostracize, verb: to banish or expel.

As for scientists who might be tempted to pursue the theory, he says, they worry that their colleagues might ostracize them for stepping out of line and that their funding could suffer.

-- Jon Cohen, "The Hunt for the Origin of AIDS", The Atlantic, October 2000

7.      autocrat, noun: a ruler with unlimited authority.

The Russian noble is alike a serf to his autocrat, and an autocrat to his serf.

-- Herbert Spencer, Social Statics

8.      beholden, adjective: obliged; indebted.

Peter did not intend to be beholden to any of his relatives unless they proved their worth.

-- Lindsey Hughes, Russia in the Age of Peter the Great

9.      aplomb, noun: confidence; coolness.

His initial broadcasting success was due at least as much to his considerable professional aplomb as it was to his father's broadcasting connections.

-- John A. Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock 'n' Roll Empire

10.  disheveled, adjective: in loose disorder; disarranged.

I was known for my disheveled attire, messy desk and erratic work habits.

-- Michael Isikoff, Uncovering Clinton

11.  precocious, adjective: characterized by or characteristic of exceptionally early development.

He quickly acquired a grandiose and precocious vocabulary.

-- Christopher Phelps, Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist

12.  reticent, adjective: inclined to keep silent.

Within a circle of intimate friends, he's a very sociable person, says Russell Banks, another novelist, who has known Auster since 1977. "Outside of that circle, he's fairly shy and reticent."

-- "Case of the Brooklyn Symbolist", New York Times, August 30, 1992

13.  legerdemain, noun: sleight of hand.

We are inclined to regard the treatment of [paradoxes] . . . as a mere legerdemain of words.

-- Benjamin Jowett, Dialogues of Plato

14.  vituperate, verb: to overwhelm with wordy abuse.

The incensed priests...continued to raise their voices, vituperating each other in bad Latin.

-- Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

15.  foment, verb: to nurse to life or activity; to incite.

Cynical politicians may even foment conflicts among groups to advance their own power.

-- Martha Minow, Not Only for Myself

16.  contumely, adverb: rudeness compounded of haughtiness and contempt.

Nothing aggravates tyranny so much as contumely.

-- Edmund Burke

17.  philomath, noun: a lover of learning; a scholar.

It is precisely for the philomaths that universities ought to cater.

-- Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies

18.  aesthete, noun: one who cultivates great sensitivity to beauty.

Where the standard Oxford aesthete of the 1920s had been showily dissipated, full of wild talk about decadence and beauty, Auden was preaching a new gospel of icy austerity and self-control.

-- Ian Hamilton, Against Oblivion

19.  nefarious, adjective: wicked in the extreme.

The liar, however, can become a truly subversive and scandalous figure, whose nefarious influence may extend far more widely than her own individual actions.

-- John Forrester, Truth Games

20.  proclivity, noun: a natural inclination.

New York City is full of people like Mr. O'Neal -- life-long bibliophiles with a proclivity for accumulation, holed up in compact spaces in the intimate company of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of books.

-- "For Some, Acquiring Books Has Become a Compulsion", New York Times, July 6, 1997

21.  flout, verb: to treat with contempt and disregard.

Who put your beauty to this flout and scorn

By dressing it in rags.

-- Tennyson, Idylls of the King

22.  sesquipedalian, noun: (of words) long; having many syllables.

As a sesquipedalian stylist, he can throw a word like 'eponymous" into a sentence without missing a beat.

-- Campbell Patty, "The sand in the oyster", The Horn Book Magazine, May 15, 1996

23.  inchoate, adjective: partly but not fully in existence or operation.

Mildred Spock believed that, at about the age of three, her children's inchoate wills were to be shaped like vines sprouting up a beanpole.

-- Thomas Maier, Dr. Spock: An American Life

24.  circumlocution, noun: the use of many words to express an idea that might be expressed by few.

Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.

-- H.W. Fowler, The King's English

25.  wayworn, adjective: wearied by traveling.

The wayworn Battalions halt in the Avenue: they have, for the present, no wish so pressing as that of shelter and rest.

-- Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution