Week 11: vocabulary

1.      meticulous: extremely careful about details.

Whatever else he taught me about science, Schotté also helped me understand that meticulous  attention to detail and patience are as important to problem solving as a grand vision.

-- David Kessler, A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle With a Deadly Industry

2.      wayworn: 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

3.      parlous: fraught with danger; hazardous.

The Crisis left Indonesia's state finances in such a parlous state that the government is now heavily exposed to future risks.

-- Penny Crisp and Jose Manuel Tesoro, "The Buck Stops Here", Asiaweek, July 7, 2000

4.      vim: energy; vigor.

The 76-year-old retired Malaysian schoolteacher displayed so much vim during a recent hike through a national park in Sarawak, astonished rangers began calling her a "recycled teenager."

-- Choong Tet Sieu, "The Power to Go On and On", Asiaweek , July 28, 2000

5.      booboisie: a class of people regarded as stupid or foolish.

He was primarily a radical freethinker who noisily waged war against the booboisie.

-- Richard Lingeman, "Disturber of the Peace", Washington Post, November 3, 2002

6.      orotund: full in sound; also, bombastic.

I have been cursed to stalk the night through all eternity, he went on, his voice orotund, carrying all across the playground.

-- Michael Chabon, Werewolves in Their Youth

7.      palindrome: a word, verse, phrase, or sentence that reads the same backward or forward.

Madam, I'm Adam. (Adam's first words to Eve?)

8.      flippant: showing inappropriate levity; pert.

The conversations had grown more adult over the years--she was less flippant, at least.

-- Sylvia Brownrigg, The Metaphysical Touch

9.      irrefragable: impossible to refute.

I had the most irrefragable evidence of the absolute truth and soundness of the principle upon which my invention was based.

-- Sir Henry Bessemer, Autobiography

10.  cogent: appealing to the mind or to reason; convincing.

I suggested to the student that she take her refusal as the theme of her term paper and ponder it as carefully as possible. A few weeks later she submitted one of the most cogent, intelligent papers I have read.

-- Denis Donoghue, The Practice of Reading

11.  ukase: an edict.

I took a playwriting course from the noted Prof. A. M. Drummond, a huge man on crutches who right off the bat delivered a ukase never to begin a play with the telephone ringing.

-- Arthur Laurents, Original Story By

12.  fetid: stinking.

The air was fetid, heavy as the breath of a large animal.

-- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Bad Dreams

13.  badinage: light, playful talk.

The badinage was inconsequential, reduced to who knew whom and wasn't the weather glorious in St. Tropez, or the Bahamas, Hawaii, or Hong Kong?

-- Robert Ludlum, The Matarese Countdown

14.  atelier: a workshop; a studio.

A garage in Montparnasse served as Leo's atelier, and there he labored on his huge triptychs, mixing his paints in buckets and applying them with a kitchen mop.

-- Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version

15.  posit: to postulate; also, to suggest.

Some scientists subscribe to this "catastrophic" view of evolutionary history and posit such events as meteoritic collisions with earth, viral epidemics, and explosive evolutionary changes as responsible for species extinctions in the past.

-- Noel T. Boaz Ph.D., Eco Homo

16.  callow: immature.

George Black Jr was grateful that during his protracted courtship of Betty, his future father-in-law 'bore my callow unsophistication with benign indulgence'.

-- Richard Siklos, Shades of Black

17.  succinct: brief; concise.

Susan was many things, and almost all of them wondrous, but she was not succinct . I minded this less than I might have, because I loved to listen to her talk.

-- Robert B. Parker, Sudden Mischief

18.  lugubrious: mournful; gloomy; dismal.

His patriarchy often seemed lugubrious; he would often have tears in his eyes when elucidating all my failings.

-- Richard Elman, Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memoirs

19.  officious: meddlesome.

The guy was an officious twerp, but Luke and Pete were vagrants, and a railroad employee had the right to throw them out.

-- Ken Follett, Code to Zero

20.  castigate: to punish or criticize severely.

Out in the world they marvelled that they were found acceptable to others, after years of being castigated as unsatisfactory, disappointing.

-- Anita Brookner, Falling Slowly

21.  propinquity: nearness.

I was stunned by the propinquity of the events: I had never been in the same room with anyone who was later murdered.

-- Karla Jay, Tales of the Lavender Menace

22.  descant: a discourse; also, to discourse.

These to their nests,

Were slunk, all but the wakeful nightingale;

She all night long her amorous descant sung.

-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

23.  robustious: boisterous; vigorous.

When the meaning of the disturbance became clear to him he placed a hand beside his mouth and shouted: "Hey! Frank!" in such a robustious voice that the feeble clamor of the natives was drowned and silenced.

-- O. Henry, Cabbages and Kings

24.  subfusc: dark or dull in color.

Her inscrutable figure -- imposing in designer subfusc, slightly donnish, reminiscent of Vita Sackville-West, to whom she was distantly related -- baffled and intrigued some.

-- Yvonne Whiteman, "Obituary: Frances Lincoln", Independent, March 6, 2001

25.  jollification: merrymaking; revelry.

Some inform; some prompt the conscience; some entertain, while having more than jollification in mind.

-- Stuart Klawans, "A Greek Bearing Gifts", The Nation, June 21, 1999