Week 12: vocabulary
1. alfresco: outdoors; outdoor.
Turner escaped from the entangled politics of London's
art world, where the Royal Academy was marooned in petty disputes, to paint
alfresco on the riverbanks.
-- Siri
Huntoon, "Down by the Riverside", New York Times, November 7, 1993
She is the young Magda redivivus to the last degree,
including the way she arches her eyebrow when she speaks.
-- Judith
Dunford, "Exit Laughing", Newsday, May 8, 1994
He noted with chagrin how little hair clung to his head.
-- John Marks,
The Wall
Here we see the insecure, unattractive woman who at long
last has found someone even more insecure and unattractive than herself,
calling attention to her companion's gaucherie in order to feel, for once in
her life, like the belle of the ball.
-- Florence
King, "Out and About", National Review, November 9, 1998
Although Black didn't have many friends and was not among
the school's leaders, he was likeable, had panache, and his contemptuous
tirades were rarely taken at face value.
-- Richard
Siklos, Shades of Black: Conrad Black and the World's Fastest Growing Press
Empire
It's also not good if your date has logorrhea.
-- Monte
Williams, "8 Minutes in the Life of a Jewish Single: Not Attracted?
Next!", New York Times , March 5, 2000
I can scarcely find time to write you even a Love Letter,
Samuel Adams, an assiduous committeeman, wrote his wife in early 1776.
-- Pauline
Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence
Following the course of the brook, and especially in the
ravines, are many poplars and other tall trees, which, together with the bushes
and the shrubs, form a dark and labyrinthine wood. . . . It would, in truth, be
difficult to imagine anything more secluded and sylvan, more solitary,
peaceful, and silent than this spot.
-- Juan
Valera, Pepita Jimenez
The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, on the other hand, is
more of a voluptuary, taking conscious pleasure in its own reflected richness.
-- Bernard
Holland, "The Suisse Romande's Evolution Since Ansermet", New York
Times, October 30, 1989
They were a hard-driven, hardworking crowd inured to the
hardest living, and they found their recreation in hard drinking and hard
fighting.
-- Allen
Barra, Inventing Wyatt Earp
The priest studied the birth stars of husband and wife,
and chose the most auspicious date for a groundbreaking ceremony, a chilly day
in April.
-- Alastair
Gordon, "Raj Style Takes the Silk Road to the Suburbs", New York
Times, January 27, 2000
If on the first, how heinous e'er it be,
To win thy
after-love I pardon thee.
--
Shakespeare, Richard II
Desperate to win his father's attention and respect,
Kennedy became a hard man for a long while, covering over his sensitivity and
capacity for empathy with a carapace of arrogance.
-- Evan
Thomas, Robert Kennedy: His Life
Once in power, though, Clinton stumbled repeatedly over
obstacles created by the schizoid campaign he had conducted, in which he had
cast himself simultaneously as the champion of a more conservative Democratic
credo and as a paladin of the party's
traditional activism.
-- Robert
Shogan, The Fate of the Union
The person whom the traveller had so abruptly encountered
was of this kind: bluff, hale, hearty, and in a green old age: at peace with
himself, and evidently disposed to be so with all the world.
-- Charles
Dickens, Barnaby Rudge
Espionage is about redefining Good and Evil, the violable
and the sacrosanct.
-- Edward
Shirley, Know Thine Enemy
Interspersed with diverse lectures and classroom
activities were periods of financial difficulty, military service, and
employment as a private tutor, all of which added to the curious melange of
experiences that would ultimately blossom into his unexpected and remarkable
life's work.
-- Norman
Brosterman, Inventing Kindergarten
Spurred by the vainglory of being the first person in
recent memory to catch a Solovki canal trout on a fly, I fished with newfound
intensity.
-- Fen
Montaigne, Reeling in Russia
Unlike progressive educators of the past, who openly
proclaimed their goals, today's multiculturalists are generally unwilling to
engage the wider public in open debate about their methods, preferring to
promote their agenda sub rosa.
-- Sol Stern,
"Losing Our Language", Commentary, May 1999
This week, over 3,000 digerati will converge at a swank theater
where chef Julia Child and pundit Arianna Huffington, among others, will judge
135 Web sites.
-- David
Whitman, "The calm before the storms", U.S.News & World Report,
May 15, 2000
Baudelaire knew that this brave defense of the much
derided middle class, offered without a touch of sarcasm, put him at odds with
his confreres ; to them, after all, "that inoffensive being" the
bourgeois," who would like nothing better than to love good
painting," had long been anathema.
-- Peter Gay,
Pleasure Wars
Querulous Oscar rattles on, never more or less than
himself, but never much more than the content of his grumpy rattling.
-- Sven
Birkerts, "A Frolic of His Own", New Republic, February 7, 1994
The local heroes received meals, heard speeches, were
presented with flags, and were accompanied to railroad stations by vociferous crowds.
-- Jeffry D.
Wert, A Brotherhood of Valor
But to judge by the twinkling summer stars that filled
the firmament, the dawn was still far off.
-- A. B.
Yehoshua, A Journey to the End of the Millennium
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
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