Week 9: vocabulary

1.      parsimonious: frugal to excess.

His mother became increasingly parsimonious over the years, and even if there were a good doctor around she did not like to pay one.

-- Willard Sterne Randall, George Washington: A Life

2.      moiety: a half; a small part.

Tom divided the cake and Becky ate with good appetite, while Tom nibbled at his moiety.

-- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876

3.      venial: capable of being forgiven; excusable.

Look less severely on a venial error.

-- Jean Racine, Phaedra (translated by Robert Bruce Boswell)

4.      accede: to agree or assent; also, to become a party.

Well, after much blustering and standing and sitting, he acceded to my demand.

-- Alfred Alcorn, Murder in the Museum of Man

5.      portend: to foreshadow; to bode.

Although no humans were there to witness the giant comet of 65 million years ago, in this case it really did portend disaster.

-- Walter Alvarez, T. Rex and the Crater of Doom

6.      chthonic: dwelling in or under the earth; also, pertaining to the underworld.

"Driven by dæmonic, chthonic Powers."

-- T.S. Eliot,

7.      mercurial: changeable; temperamental; volatile.

The bulky, white-thatched Georgia congressman was a mercurial, impulsive personality; a brilliant visionary one moment, a petulant, uncontrollable four-year-old the next.

-- Dan Balz and Ronald Brownstein, Storming the Gates

8.      ineffable: incapable of being expressed.

Pope John Paul II notes that people are drawn to religion to answer the really big questions--for example, "What is the ultimate ineffable mystery which is the origin and destiny of our existence?"

-- William A. Sherden, The Fortune Sellers

9.      adventitious: added extrinsically; not essentially inherent.

I want first to argue that Nietzsche's contempt for democracy was an adventitious extra, inessential to his overall philosophical outlook.

-- Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism as Romantic Polytheism",

10.  omnipresent: present in all places at the same time.

Civilization is the preserve of the rich, with their polished cars, their locked houses and their omnipresent police force.

-- Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places

11.  gourmand: one who enjoys good food in great quantities.

Fifine was a frank gourmand; anybody could win her heart through her palate.

-- Charlotte Brontë, Villette

12.  crepuscular: pertaining to twilight.

I've been through their checkout and noted its resemblance to Hades - the crepuscular gloom, the dungeon lighting, the mile-long shuffling queue, the glum, sickly faces, the trolleys piled high with flat-pack cardboard units.

-- John Walsh, "btw", Independent, February 12, 2005

13.  exalt: to praise, glorify, or honor.

Other cultures worship twins as a divine gift; for instance, the voodoo practitioners of West Africa and Haiti exalt twins as supernatural beings with a single soul, who are to be revered and feared.

-- Lawrence Wright, Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are

14.  contradistinction: distinction by contrast.

The music was breathing constantly, in contradistinction to the willfully suffocated feeling of most heavy music.

-- Ben Ratliff, "A Brazilian Band Emerges From the Loss of Its Leader", New York Times, July 28, 2000

15.  soporific: causing sleep; also, something that causes sleep.

Hamilton's voice droned on, hypnotic, soporific, the gloom beyond the windows like the backdrop of a waking dream.

-- T. Coraghessan Boyle, Riven Rock

16.  deride: to laugh at with contempt.

I had no desire to endorse idiocy -- but neither could I be seen to deride a colleague.

-- Michael Foley, Getting Used to Not Being Remarkable

17.  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

18.  bellwether: a leader or leading indicator.

Before that election, Maine's proud citizens had fancied their state to be a sort of bellwether, a notion embodied in the saying "As Maine goes, so goes the nation."

-- Robert Shogan, The Fate of the Union

19.  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

20.  riparian: of or pertaining to the bank of a river.

Along its serpentine course, the Charles River widens and narrows, and its riparian sounds swell to crescendos in places or relax to the low purr of a river at peace.

-- Craig Lambert, Mind Over Water: Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing

21.  mordant: biting; caustic; sarcastic.

He had a mordant wit as well . . . , a bit wicked and waspish even.

-- Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books

22.  woebegone: woeful; also, run-down.

Socrates, condemned to death by the people of Athens, prepares to drink a cup of hemlock, surrounded by woebegone friends.

-- Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

23.  scintilla: a tiny amount; a spark.

In victory, they must hold on to at least a scintilla of humility, lest they get too cocky -- and ripe for a takedown.

-- Bill Breen, "We are literally trying to stop time", Fast Company, May 2000

24.  halcyon: peaceful; undisturbed; happy.

It was a halcyon life, cocktails and bridge at sunset, white jackets and long gowns at dinner, good gin and Gershwin under the stars.

-- Elizabeth M. Norman, We Band of Angels

25.  tendentious: marked by a strong tendency in favor of a particular point of view.

All types of social disagreements seem to be routed almost inexorably into the tendentious jargon and intellectually impoverished categories of legal reasoning, until everyone from Alan Dershowitz to the guy fixing your radiator insists on giving you his opinion about fundamental rights, or presumptions of innocence, or probable cause, or--God help us--"what the Constitution requires."

-- Paul F. Campos, Jurismania: The Madness of American Law