Week 7: vocabulary

1.      camarilla: a group of secret and often scheming advisers.

The arrest in October 1976 of Mao's radical camarilla, the so-called Gang of Four, led by his maniacal widow, Jiang Qing, was the second "liberation," delivering the Chinese from the most extreme forms of ideological conditioning.

-- Willem Van Kemenade, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Inc.

2.      torpid: dull; sluggish; apathetic.

For more than twenty years--all my adult life--I have lived here: my great weight sunk, torpid in the heat, into this sagged chair on my rooftop patio.

-- Peggy Payne, Sister India

3.      concomitant: accompanying; attending.

In short, the inevitable concomitant of autocracy . . . is aggression and imperialism.

-- Martin Malia, Russia Under Western Eyes

4.      stasis: a state of balance, equilibrium, or stagnation.

Whether trabeated, arcuated, or suspended, a structure seeks stasis by balancing forces in tension and compression.

-- James F. O'Gorman, ABC of Architecture

5.      prepotency: predominance.

These several remarks are apparently applicable to animals; but the subject is here much complicated, partly owing to the existence of secondary sexual characters; but more especially owing to prepotency  in transmitting likeness running more strongly in one sex than in the other, both when one species is crossed with another, and when one variety is crossed with another variety.

-- Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

6.      bagatelle: a trifle; also, a short, light literary or musical piece.

Excepting the regulars, the troops were raw as were likewise most of their officers; and this March of twenty-seven miles, which a year later would have been considered a bagatelle, was now a mighty undertaking.

-- James Ford Rhodes, History of the Civil War

7.      insensate: lacking sensation or awareness.

But then, without warning, the conflict degenerated, and the insensate killing began.

-- Jay Winik, "Between Honor and Glory", American Spectator, February 1, 2001

8.      confute: to refute conclusively.

Having settled in Rome in 1486, he proposed 900 theses and challenged any scholar to confute them, agreeing to pay his expenses.

-- David S. Katz and Richard H. Popkin, Messianic Revolution

9.      revenant: one who returns after death or a long absence.

He pale, immobile like a revenant himself, looked sometimes out of the window, sometimes closed his eyes.

-- D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

10.  corroborate: to strengthen or make more certain with other evidence.

As we have no public notoriety, no concurrent testimony, no records to support and corroborate what we deliver, it becomes us to keep within the limits not only of possibility, but of probability too.

-- Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones

11.  exegete: one who explains or interprets difficult parts of written works.

All the things said in this passage are clear and should be paid attention to, without an exegete interpreting.

-- Galen, "Commentary on Hippocrates", On the Nature of Man

12.  dubiety: the condition or quality of being doubtful; also, a matter of doubt.

Here, the historical evidence would seem to be tricky but free from all dubieties.

-- Paul Taylor, "A mechanical science lesson", Independent, November 21, 2001

13.  carapace: a shell; a protective covering.

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

14.  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

15.  puissant: powerful.

If we are to believe that country's literary pundits, "irreparable damage to a great British institution" may soon be done by an invading army more puissant  than Hannibal's or Alexander's, an army Marching out of the creative writing schools of American universities, leaving Will Shakespeare's sceptred isle "smothered amid a landslide of books from the US".

-- Jonathan Yardley, "Bring on the Yanks", The Guardian, June 5, 2002

16.  aplomb: confidence; coolness.

His initial broadcasting success was due at least as much to his considerable professional aplomb as it was to his father's broadcasting connections.

-- John A. Jackson, American Bandstand: Dick Clark and the Making of a Rock 'n' Roll Empire

17.  procrastination: To put off doing something.

Procrastination is the thief of time.

-- Edward Young, The Complaint: Night Thoughts

18.  opportune: suitable for a given purpose or occasion.

O lesson opportune, O how I welcome thee!

-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

19.  renascent: rising again into being; showing renewed vigor.

In the wings a renascent conservative movement waited to make the most of that discontent.

-- Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies

20.  fettle: a state or condition of fitness, order, or mind.

Many of the nuns were in fine fettle, even into their 80s and 90s.

-- John McCrone, "Sisters of mercy", The Guardian, August 18, 2001

21.  proponent: an advocate.

He was a forthright proponent of the Vietnam War, contemptuous of the anti-war movement.

-- Richard Siklos, Shades of Black

22.  cursory: hastily or superficially performed.

On most days, however, she confined her daily reading to a cursory scan of two or three newspapers.

-- James A. Drake, Rosa Ponselle: A Centenary Biography

23.  numinous: spiritual.

My sense of the numinous is generally keenest upstate, in the fields and forest that surround my old schoolhouse.

-- Winifred Gallagher, Working on God

24.  evince: to show in a clear manner.

Those who supported the war in Vietnam evinced no such fears and no reluctance about new adventures abroad.

-- William M. Leogrande, Our Own Backyard

25.  recondite: difficult to understand.

He is a poet's poet, says another admirer, sometimes recondite and always deeply aware of the formal tradition of poetry.

-- "Crown prince of puns to give the past new life", Irish Times, May 22, 1999