Week 15: vocabulary (children literature)
Behind the professional caution is a figure of storied
warmth and charm, an American-educated cosmopolite as comfortable in the
Midwest as in the Middle East.
-- Paula Span, "Man of Many Worlds", Washington
Post, February 28, 1998
Then he climbed up the little iron ladder that led to the
wharf's cap, placed me once more upon his shoulders and galumphed off again.
-- Alistair MacLeod, Island: The Complete Stories
Those were his salad days, and he thought they might last
forever.
-- David Gergen, "They Love You. Watch Out",
New York Times, February 2, 1997
Mounted encounters by armored knights locked in desperate
hand-to-hand combat, stabbing and wrestling in tavern brawls, deceits and
brutalities in street affrays, balletic homicide on the dueling field--these
were the martial arts of Renaissance Europe.
-- Sydney Anglo, The Martial Arts of Renaissance Europe
A faineant government is not the worst government that
England can have. It has been the great fault of our politicians that they have
all wanted to do something.
-- Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn
Tara has supermodel legs and is already getting used to
being prinked and coiffed as she prepares for her first beauty contest in the
autumn.
-- Raffaella Barker, "Diary hatched, matched and
almost despatched", Daily Telegraph, September 6, 1997
7. parsimonious: frugal to excess.
Lehmann was famously parsimonious, and used postwar
shortages as a cover for his economies.
-- John Richardson, The Sorcerer's Apprentice
8. moiety: a half; a small part.
Tom divided the cake and Becky ate with good appetite,
while Tom nibbled at his moiety.
-- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
9. venial: capable of being forgiven; excusable.
His mistake might in other circumstances have seemed a
venial one.
-- Michael Knox Beran, The Last Patrician
10. accede: to agree or assent; also,
to become a party.
Well, after much blustering and standing and sitting, he
acceded to my demand.
-- Alfred Alcorn, Murder in the Museum of Man
11. portend: to foreshadow; to bode.
Many signs portended a dark and stormy day.
-- Macaulay
12. chthonic: dwelling in or under the earth; also,
pertaining to the underworld.
"Driven by dæmonic, chthonic Powers."
-- T.S. Eliot
13. mercurial: changeable; temperamental;
volatile.
The bulky, white-thatched Georgia congressman was a
mercurial, impulsive personality; a brilliant visionary one moment, a petulant,
uncontrollable four-year-old the next.
-- Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein, Storming the Gates
14. ineffable: incapable of being expressed.
One cannot blame them very much; explaining the ineffable
is difficult.
-- Edward O. Wilson, "The Biological Basis of
Morality", The Atlantic, April 1998
15. adventitious: 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"
16. omnipresent: present in all places at the same
time.
It was rather that myth was omnipresent; the whole people
thought in this way and were long confirmed in their belief.
-- Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization
17. gourmand: one who enjoys good food in great
quantities.
Her husband was stigmatised as a 'gourmand' who
excessively enjoyed 'the pleasures of the table'.
-- Andrew Motion, Keats
18. crepuscular: pertaining to twilight.
Most communication systems in luminescent fireflies have
been studied in nocturnal species; little is known concerning communication in
crepuscular and diurnal species.
-- Nobuyoshi Ohba, "Flash Communication Systems of
Japanese Fireflies", Integrative and Comparative Biology, June 2004
19. exalt: 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
20. contradistinction: distinction by contrast.
The music was breathing constantly, in contradistinction
to the willfully suffocated feeling of most heavy music.
-- Ben Ratliff, "A Brazilian Band Emerges From the
Loss of Its Leader", New York Times, July 28, 2000
21. soporific: causing sleep; also,
something that causes sleep.
Hamilton's voice droned on, hypnotic, soporific, the
gloom beyond the windows like the backdrop of a waking dream.
-- T. Coraghessan Boyle, Riven Rock
22. deride: to laugh at with contempt.
I had no desire to endorse idiocy -- but neither could I
be seen to deride a colleague.
-- Michael Foley, Getting Used to Not Being Remarkable
23. laconic: 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. bellwether: 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. effulgence: the state of being bright and
radiant.
The setting sun as usual shed a melancholy effulgence on
the ruddy towers of the Alhambra.
-- Washington Irving, The Alhambra
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