Week 18: vocabulary
1. prevaricate: to depart from or evade the
truth.
The leadership's perennial obsession with secrecy led it
to prevaricate about the extent of the disease in the capital for five months.
-- Roderick
Macfarquhar, "Unhealthy Politics", Newsweek International, May 12,
2003
New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani called Monday on the
members of the United Nations to unite in a global effort to eradicate
terrorism and to ostracize countries that refuse to join.
-- Stevenson
Swanson, "Giuliani asks global effort on terrorism", Chicago Tribune,
October 2, 2001
You fillip me o' the head.
--
Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida
He always told romanticised apocryphal stories of his
ancestry, sometimes a bastard grandfather, brought up on the parish, sometimes
"a weaver, half poet and half madman."
-- Kathleen
Jones, A Passionate Sisterhood
Wont to harangue the citizenry in public speeches with
such lines as "Remember! My father gave you freedom!" Mrs. Gandhi did
not take lightly to government officers with an independent turn of mind.
-- Gita Mehta,
Snakes and Ladders
Despite the December afternoon sunlight, the interior of
the copse looked dark and impenetrable. The fact that none of the trees were
covered in snow appeared to him to be improbable but welcome.
-- John
Berger, Once in Europa
Yet little has been written of him (he obfuscated details
of his life in interviews), and his art is little recalled.
-- Gary
Giddins, Visions of Jazz
Grass plants possess an agrestic simplicity that probably
connects them, at some level of mind, with wholesome grain and the restorative
country life.
-- George
Schen, The Complete Shade Gardener
William Rothenstein described the Academie as a "
congeries of studios crowded with students, the walls thick with palette
scrapings, hot, airless and extremely noisy."
-- Jeffrey
Meyers, Bogart: A Life in Hollywood
He would have a long way to go before he would match his
peripatetic father. Nick had now moved five times and lived in four states from
Kentucky to California.
-- Allen
Barra, Inventing Wyatt Earp
The arm being bound, and the veins made turgid, and the
valves prominent, as before, apply the thumb or finger over a vein in the
situation of one of the valves in such a way as to compress it, and prevent any
blood from passing upwards from the hand.
-- William Harvey,
On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals
12. idyll: a poem or
prose work depicting rural or pastoral life; also, a carefree
episode or experience.
She kept a diary that poignantly captured the sense of
youthful gaiety shattered by events suddenly intruding on their teenage idyll.
-- James T.
Fisher, Dr. America
I will begin ab ovo -- at the very beginning.
-- War and
Peace by Leo Tolstoy
He was by nature intellectual, shy, even gauche and he
always believed he lacked the common touch.
--
"Editor whose legacy was diversity", Irish Times, October 9, 1999
Confronted again with pictures of flag-draped coffins and
mutilated bodies, with the sounds of random gunfire and angry chants, the world
had to readjust to the fact that not every problem is solvable, that the global
tide of peace is not inexorable, and that progress does not inevitably make
civilizations more civilized.
-- "Fires
Of Hate", Time, October 23, 2000
Certainly, to have even a putative ancestor commemorated
by Shakespeare is something about which to boast.
-- Frances
Spalding, Duncan Grant: A Biography
It wasn't a good joke, and, in his dotage, he made it far
too often, but when I heard it for the first time I remember laughing and
thinking, with pleasure, that I was catching on to the tricks adults played
with words.
-- Rob Nixon,
Dreambirds
I have seen a swan
With bootless labour swim against the tide.
--
Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part III
Those close to Clark from childhood were not surprised at
how quickly he recognized the lucrative financial opportunities commercial
announcing afforded, for Clark had demonstrated a proclivity for entrepreneurship
as a youth.
-- John A.
Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock 'n' Roll
Empire
By the 1920s a stubborn agricultural depression . . .
badly exacerbated the problems of the countryside.
-- David M.
Kennedy, Freedom From Fear
Both the old and new elites, not the subaltern underclass
of workers and peasants, superimposed the fever chart of the Russian Revolution
on what they assumed to have been the fever chart of the French Revolution with
a view to determining the degree to which the temperature curves of the two
revolutions diverged from each other.
-- Arno J.
Mayer, The Furies
One hundred seventeen and a half pesos! Did you think you
could mollify me with that amount, Philip V?
-- Ana Teresa
Torres, Doña Inés vs. Oblivion
In the space of the last five years, he fearlessly gained
40 pounds, displaying a trencherman's appetite for life and an admirable
disdain for cardiologists and Surgeon Generals whining about moderation.
-- Martin
Lewis, "Comb Back, Big Hair - All Is Forgiven", Time, December 23,
2000
Tired of putting on and taking off the same five pounds?
Don't delay, buy this book today -- and watch yourself shed both respectability
and surplus avoirdupois!
-- David
Galef, "J. Faust's Guide to Power And Other Self-Help Classics", New
York Times, December 18, 1994
Molly also noticed that the window frames had grooves of
soft lead, less than an inch wide and shaped like blunt hooks, into which the
glass could be slotted at night or during inclement weather.
-- Annabel Davis-Goff,
The Dower House
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