Week 14: vocabulary

1.      puerile: juvenile; childish.

Political argument is becoming a puerile cartoon about the moral . . . doing battle with the immoral.

-- George F. Will, "The Costs of Moral Exhibitionism", Washington Post, April 15, 2001

2.      nadir: the lowest point.

Exploitation reached a nadir in the 1920s, when high government officials were implicated in a flourishing international slave trade and domestic forced labor.

-- Bill Berkeley, The Graves Are Not Yet Full

3.      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

4.      inchoate: 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

5.      beneficence: the practice of doing good.

From my grandfather Verus I learned good morals and the government of my temper. From the reputation and remembrance of my father, modesty and a manly character. From my mother, piety and beneficence and abstinence.

-- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

6.      sempiternal: everlasting; eternal.

Finally, Syon's orchards are the world as our imagination would like it to be -- not wilderness, since orchards are after all planted and cultivated by farmers, but a sempiternal and ideal region of the mind.

-- Thomas L. Jeffers, "That which sustains us", Commentary, June 2002

7.      onus: burden; also, blame; stigma.

The onus of leadership fell on him.

-- Scott Ritter, Endgame

8.      abstemious: temperate; abstinent; refraining from indulgence.

They were healthy and abstemious; their chief pleasure was reading and Oliver was a life member of the London Library.

-- Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Music at Long Verney

9.      cant: to talk hypocritically.

I don't deny but that may sooner teach a Man to Cant and talk Gibberish, or use fair, smooth, formal Phrases, and religious Words.

-- Richard Ward and Sarah Hutton, The Life of Henry More

10.  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

11.  palpable: 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

12.  gewgaw: a trinket; a bauble.

Bidders paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for worthless gewgaws --fake pearls, ashtrays, golf clubs--merely, one supposes, because they were touched by the hand of this celebrity of celebrities.

-- Lawrence M. Friedman, The Horizontal Society

13.  conurbation: an aggregation or continuous network of urban communities.

Indeed the population in the greater London conurbation grew by 125 per cent in the period 1861 to 1911 when the population of England as a whole grew by 80 per cent.

-- Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats

14.  sinecure: an office or position that involves little work or responsibility.

I was fortunate to receive the . . . offer, which in practical terms was a sinecure.

-- David Freeman, One of Us

15.  abjure: to renounce, reject, or shun.

He closed his eyes as he raised the goblet to his lips and took a small sip of the cool liquid, and then his face paled as he understood how sublime the taste of the forbidden drink was, and how easily one might become enslaved to it. There and then he resolved to abjure it totally.

-- A. B. Yehoshua, A Journey to the End of theMillennium

16.  lackadaisical: 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

17.  aberrant: 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

18.  votary: one devoted to some pursuit, worship, study, or way of life.

When she held out her hand to receive the glass, she had more the air of a full-grown Bacchante, celebrating the rites of Bacchus, than a votary at the shrine of Hygeia.

-- Pamela Neville-Sington, Fanny Trollope

19.  pelf: money; riches.

She writes about those she might have known first-hand: teenage girls cowering in bunkers . . . friends making promises they can never keep . . . rich folk fattened on wartime pelf , poor folk surviving by wit alone.

-- Harriet P. Gross, "Author roots her stories in Vietnam War", Dallas Morning News, July 20, 1997

20.  tocsin: a warning.

But Mr. Beckett is wise in choosing the form of the myth in which to sound his tocsin on the condition of human society.

-- Brooks Atkinson, "Beckett's 'Endgame'", New York Times, January 29, 1958

21.  lexicon: a dictionary; also, the vocabulary of a person, group, etc.

He thought it right in a lexicon of our language to collect many words which had fallen into disuse.

-- James Boswell, Life of Johnson

22.  umbrage: offense; resentment.

In almost all the walks of his life, he appears to have been both astoundingly rude and genuinely astonished that anyone should take umbrage.

-- Robert Winder, "A dying game", New Statesman, June 19, 2000

23.  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

24.  loquacious: very talkative.

Blatant symbolism combines with outrageous humor. This ad campaign has continuity, for the preceding ad featured the loquacious bottle talking to a tomato.

-- Philip B. Meggs, Meggs' History of Graphic Design

25.  bruit: To report; to noise abroad.

The first originated with a professor of government who, it was bruited, had always succeeded in predicting the outcome of presidential-year elections.

-- William F. Buckley Jr., "We didn't tell you so", National Review, November 29, 2004