• goody-two-shoes | “...cause there's nothing I hate more than goody-two-shoes”. (shouted a sadistic mistress with her whip smacking down the tender ass of an innocent goody-goody blonde.) —from Japanese comics Fetish Fairies by Kondom.(amazon.com↗).
• thoroughfare, downturn | Highway 101 — the valley's main thoroughfare — mutely advertise the downturn [Time Mag on economic recession in stocks of early 2001, 2001/03/26]
• slipshod
• far-fetched | you theory is a bit far-fetched
• smokestack | the smokestack industry
• forthright
• deadlock | me and my girlfriend reached a deadlock position
• lock horns | ... of course, if you stubbornly disagree, then we can proceed to lock horns.
• walleye | Wall-eyed is funnier than cross-eyed [suck.com]
• straitlaced | Annette Bening, in a comedic tour de force, plays Lester's wife Carolyn, a straitlaced, uptight, worry wart who sells real estate. [web comment on film American Beauty]
• well-heeled | ... those well-heeled, starry-eyed Macintosh users... [an article on Apple's Cube computer...]
• hunky-dory | thought it's all hunky-dory...
• poppycock | cockamamy; kit and caboodle; shebang
• bugbear | I don't feel all that evangelical about this though. The real bugbear is the paper size. If Americans would switch to A4 I'd be very happy. [online discussion on Metric vs British measuring system.]
• rubbernecking | God, the more I dig the more I'm drawn in... Kinda like rubbernecking at a traffic fatality on the 405 during rush hour. [Roger Howard, 2002 in macosx-talk email]
• bughouse | One of these days, female notwithstanding, I'll end up dead or in prison if I can't change my ways. Or back in the bughouse if I'm lucky that day. [a schizoid prostitute, 2001]
• fireside
• frontispiece | part of a book. There's in no particular order: cover, preface/prologue/intro, contents, epilog, glossary, bibliography, index. corrigendum, errata.
• kingmakers | Written in the days when kingmakers really were beheaded and rebellion meant war and not a boardroom coup, (and I am sure those days still exist in the world), Titus was a revenge tragedy not unlike others of its day, but so raw and emotionally violent that it is refreshing! [online user review on the 1999 movie Titus]
• potboiler | Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare's much maligned play, and not without some justification. But in the hands of an artist such as Ms. Taymor, something quite new emerges. Where once was a potboiler of its time, now comes a witty and daring satire of our time. [online user review on the 1999 movie Titus]
• roughage | fiber
• one-armed bandit | As her losses mounted to more than $200, Budz fed the machine $5 tokens, pressing the Spin button almost rhythmically. No serious slot player touches the pull handle on a one-armed bandit. [online news ~ 2002]
• dreadlock | Rayment, 30, and his twin brother Adrian feature in the upcoming sequel Matrix Reloaded, as a pair of kung-fu fighting villains. The menacing twins play rogue virii, roaming the Matrix in all-white attire and silver dreadlocks. [See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadlock]
• hotcakes | would sell like hotcakes.
• rawboned
• honeymoon | this is the period when love birds pair off to a copulating vacation
• flimflam | From the Simpsons cartoon: Homer: “Hey, Flanders, who put that bug up your butt?” Flanders: “Ohh. I wanted to subscribe to that new Arts and Crfts Channel. Well, sir, they send over this flimflam man to install it. And do you know what he did? He offered to hook me up illegally to every cable channel for only 50 bucks.” (then Homer ran after the flimflam man)
• intercession | ...complete with intercessions by the U.S. head of state. | roughly: praying for others
• contretemp | ...then there is the female university president's contretemps with a male board member.
• pettifogger | what a pettifogger
• pockmarked | pockmarked face
• piecemeal | not a a piece of meal or oatmeal
• slapdash
• tailwind | Market's recent tailwind could die down. (stock went up) [2003 May, online news.]
• careworn | she's wearing a-polka dot dress. Her face is careworn. [dialogue from movie Wizard of Oz]
• hornswoggle | My personal opinion is that the prosecutor hornswoggled the court and the jury with this hogwash. | bamboozle
• mountebank | The last in the set is the Chasse-neige (“Snowplough”), which can be viewed as the greatest of Studies. It is unique in its mood of desolation - it has been poetically described as snow-flakes gradually covering and burying the whole world. A study of nature at her most merciless. But for those who look upon Liszt as a mountebank, as someone who writes “for effect”, I would recommend a glance at the end of the B minor Sonata and B minor Ballade. [on Fraz Liszt's music]
• cheapskates | Lindows is an operating system for Microsoft haters and cheapskates. Its flaws make Windows seem like a genuine bargain. [Stephen Manes in Forbes Mag “Doesn't do Windows”, 20020821]
• scofflaw | It's not that a cybercriminal world of conspiratorial sumugglers, scofflaws, crooked banks and tax evaders is impossible. Such countries already exist. Chances are, you're a software scofflaw. [Lisa M. Bowman, Staff Writer, News.com ,A “disturbing” download trend]
• greenhorn | Summer is over and a plague of UNIX programmers is upon us. College kids, wet behind the ears; greenhorns, rubes. [computer industry pudit John C. Dvorak, 1986, DEC Professional Mag.]
• cornball | The cornball love story between the spoiled Anakin Skywalker (Christensen) and the plastic young senator of the Republic Padme Amidala (Portman), takes center stage. [Dennis Schwartz, 2002, review of movie Star Wars II.]
• whippersnapper | here's one special-effects scene in “Attack of the Clones” that qualifies as fun: A light-saber duel between Dooku and that little whippersnapper Yoda, who's about one-sixth his size. [Stephanie Zacharek, salon.com review on Star Wars II]
• woodwork | “I'm so ... _intrigued_ by the evolutionary refuse that keeps crawling out of the woodwork to share their putrid mind with the world.” [sneering by Erik Naggum in comp.lang.lisp newsgroup.]
• bait and switch | car dealor advertise incredibly low prices cars, to get consumer to come in to eventually buy mor expensive ones that has more margin; this is bait and switch.
• apple-pie | Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution. [Phil Zimmermann, 1997?]
• unhinge
• underplay
• lonesome
• weasel out
• latchkey
• lovelorn
• overweening
• overawe
• outright
• outgoing
• scaremonger | A conservative estimate of the number of people who would die during a period of five years after only _half_ of the electronic infrastructure in the United States had collapsed is 30 million people. This is part of unclassified disaster planning that surfaced because of the Y2K scare, and it has been published widely by scaremongers that a decimation, in the technical meaning of 10% loss, of the population is considered a tolerable loss. [Erik Naggum in comp.lang.lisp]
• whitewash | Perhaps sensing that news of the whitewash might prove more embarrssing than the original problem, Infoseek went back within 24 hours and reinserted naughton's name in releases that had mentioned him. [Wired, 1999/12, p.114.]
• hand over fist | It's patently obvious to the Linux faithful that Red Hat is poised to make moolah hand-over-fist.
• pussyfoot | So many sites, so little time.... Why pussyfoot around with window dressing? Take BIG bytes out of the net with Lynx. (a slogan of a web browser software named Lynx.)
• throwback | Although they are still supported, backslashes are never needed for contiunation lines. They are a throwback to older versions of Python that didn't support the open-pairs rule. [A passage describing a backward compatible feature of the Python programing language.]
• upshot | The upshot was that I wrote a little Windows program to show some of the ideas involved
• stonewalling | In March of this year, they charged in a letter published in Microwave News that these attempts were met with stonewalling and foot-dragging. (about not paying attention to research result of damaging effects of cell phone.)
• bleeding heart | “... My mom's such a bleeding heart... she's vocal about gay rights and all that.”
• fob off
• underwriters | Underwriters and others interested in fire safety followed suit (to use the word flammable instead of inflammable)
• thunderstruck | The story he tells is about Buttercup, a beautiful princess (Robin Wright) who scornfully orders around a farm boy (Cary Elwes) until the day when she realizes, thunderstruck, that she loves him. [about the movie Princess Bride]
• landfall | A landfall was made on the morning of Oct. 12, 1492, at an island in the Bahamas.
• underfoot | In the fall one walks in the orchards and the ground is hard with frost underfoot. —Wensburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson.
• hangdog | <hang-dog look> sorry Xah, I ate'm all [m&m chocolates]. [CompuServe poster m.j.vasko, early 1990s].
• hagridden | “Ah, I see. That scientists disagree with you only proves that they are spineless, hagridden, greedy liars, perverting the truth in order to bag some nice juicy grants and get those articles into print...” [CompuServe poster Bill Snyder, early 1990s]
• highbrow | middlebrow, lowbrow.
• broadside | ...but in 1640 Pascal [Blaise] did print a one-page broadside entitled Essay pour les coniques, which announced some of his findings. Only two copies of this famous leaflet are known to be still in existence...
• hardihood
• hoodwink
• despot | autocrat, not de-spot. | depotism
• untoward
• skyjack
• runaround | Pack says he asked Stanley for his money back but instead got a runaround.
• scatterbrain | flighty, skittish, ditsy ...
• levelheaded | sensible
• inland | interior of a land
• linchpin
• horseflesh
• hinterland
• inland
• lovelorn
• underling
• instep
• claptrap
• shakeout
• jailbait | sassy jailbait [from film Exotica (1995)]| Jailbait is an interesting word. It means women who are physically mature enough to attract sexual attention of men, but is illegal to have mutually consentual sex with, because their age are under the laws of certain highly advanced societies which have declared a specification for the mental maturity of humanity. So, a jailbait is some young, pretty, buxom lasses in your neighborhood such as your daughter, who baits men into jail. Compare: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebophilia.
• tumbledown
• lumberjack
• wheelbarrow
• bedpan
• byway
• underbrush
• hayrick
• backdrop
• grand slam
• outlook
• unwitting
• daresay
• hillbilly | She tries to disguise her hillbilly accent.
• pastime
• shutterbug
• handholding | ...as customers, increasingly comfortable with personal computers and requiring less handholding, were more price-conscious and reluctant to pay for the comforts of a well-heeled operations like Businessland.
• skinflints | Such obstinacy did not go down well among the skinflints of academe...
• highborn | ...so that her highborn kinsmen came, and bore her away from me,... —Edgar Allan Poe in Annabel Lee.
• masthead | masthead n. 1. Nautical The top of a mast. 2. The listing in a newspaper or periodical of information about its staff, operation, and circulation. 3. The title of a newspaper or periodical as it appears across the first page, front cover, or title page of each issue. In this sense, also called nameplate. [American Heritage Dictionary]
• rattletrap
• upkeep | Managers of a mobile-home park were denied the rent increase they requested because residents complained about the park's upkeep.
• byword | “Smaller, faster, cheaper” are NASA's new bywords.
• muckrake | gadfly
• gadfly | Here he plays Cyrano, gadfly and rabble-rouser, man about town, friend of some, envied by many, despised by a powerful few, and hopelessly, oh, most painfully and endearingly, in love with Roxane (Anne Brochet).
• backlash | ...[students against drunken revels] have launched a growing backlash against their inebriated peers.
• outgo
• outlay | the huge outlay of grocery.
• headstrong | ...headstrong Captain Kirk of the original series...
• roughshod | we indulge our children as they run roughshod over our lives...
• landlock | ...Meryl Streep,...is landlocked in Iowa...
• threadbare | The theater was moribund, subsisting on threadbare melodramas as vacuous as they were popular,...
• ringleader | [someone said] “[she] Pops firecrackers in my apt. and hangs out with a bad crowd — probably is the ringleader!”
• whipsaw | ...and its stock was whipsawed by takeover rumors... [Time mag?] | U.S. stock whipsawed. — NEW YORK (CBS.MW) — Stocks zigzagged in and out of the plus column on Tuesday as investors responded to a number of cross-currents. For the Dow, severe losses in Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase amid mounting questions over their role in the Enron debacle challenged the index's upside. [online news caption, 2002-07-23]
• warmonger | ...the Mongols were a barbaric people who swept out of the unknown reaches of the Asian steppe, a warmongering race whose only talents were for rape, murder and pillage.
| He [Blaise Pascal] saw no room for mystery-mongering in matters of science and mathematics.
• cakewalk
• cheesecake, beefcake
• heartland | ...broadcast to the masses in the heartland...
• heartfelt | ...wound up a heartfelt speech on the horrors of spousal abuse.
• backwater
• homestretch
• underclass
• backlog
• inflow
• sidetrack
• bedevil
• daredevil | Broken Arrow, a bomb-ticking chase movie about a daredevil pilot (Travolta) who steals two nuclear weapons...
• molehill | make a mountain of of a molehill.
• handiwork
• beachhead | the machine is Microsoft's beachhead in the console wars... [Time mag 2001-11-19 on MS game XBox] | beachhead is illustrated in the opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan.
• hogwash | bosh. I had hoped to find a responsible article, instead I found hogwash...
• solar plexus
• dust bowl
• class action
• psyche and soma
• by and large
• cheval glass
• gasworks
• face-off
• outpatient
• inpatient
• quicksilver
• seaboard
• winsome
• blackguard | rascal, imp, prankster, scamp, rogue
• highball
• jaywalk | ...struck by a car while jaywalking.
• crackpot
• brinkmanship | ENTPs at times engage in brinkmanship with their careers, placing them in jeopardy and behaving as if unaware of the consequences. | US and USSR plays brinkmanship during the cold war.
• taskmaster | ...INTPs do not always enjoy much popularity, for they can be hard taskmasters.
• byline | ...a cyberpunk journalist who writes under the byline St. Jude,...
• boardwalk
• potboiler | “It doesn't ring true,” insisted Jackie Collins, author of The Bitch, The Stud, and other potboilers.
• outflank | the guy was outflanked by two cops.
• steadfast
• watershed
• drawstring
• makeshift | expedient
• offhand | in the offhand and somewhat bemused fashion...
• turncoat | he is a turncoat
• upscale | ...upscale New Yorkers...
• underwhelming
• overtax
• overwrought
• overboard | ...their tactics and their rhetoric go overboard.
• pawnbroker
• upstart
• blackface
• outwardly
• underpinning
• stronghold
• stranglehold | ...hope PowerPC would break the stranglehold that Intel has on the production of chips...
• aboveboard | I was aboveboard.
• underbrush
• flashpoint
• mishmash | miscellany, patchwork, medley, melange, conglomeration, gallimaufry, hodgepodge, olio, salmagundi
• ragtag
• wisecrack | witticism, quip, sally, gag
• freewheeling
• foxhole
• holdover
• seascape
• infighting
• nevermore
• toadstool
• puffball
• offshoot
• whippersnapper | ... learn obscure pedantic words you can use to intimidate the whippersnappers that come after you. [from a parody]
• cliffhanger
• wayside
• hang-up
• subserve
• bushwhack
• upwell
• handiwork
• shantytown
• folkway
• moonlighted
• towhead
• overblown
• seriocomic
• outclass
• offbeat
• upbeat
• polyglot
• polymath
• pothole
• kingpin
• handyman | time to hire a handyman
• outback | ... now is the time for that long-postponed trip to the Australian outback.
• runabout
• hackwork
• hobnail
• bankable
• pitchman
• matchwood
• bawdyhouse
• hothouse
• hardscrabble | ... Brad Pitt delivers [reads] Cormac McCarthy's hardscrabble prose in The Crossing with a twangy stoicism that perfectly reflects the novel's tone.
• henchmen | Jonny and Jimmy, henchmen of Los Angeles crime lord Lordy
• wallflower | I was alone on AOL and a wallflower on the WELL.
• sidelong | In a sidelong and subliminal way,...
• sideline | ...and a profitable sideline in helping the Mafia locate
• splinter group
• cold turkey | So she stopped smoking, cold turkey.
• puppy love | the puppy love, say, that turns rabid as two souls merge in a toxic rapture.
• Dutch courage | I don't need Dutch courage.
• status quo
• shore up
• far cry | A long way.
• Buck...
• foreclose
• pinprick | The pinprick attacks fail even to achieve...
• taproom
• cornerstone | the cornerstones of every package are the context ...
• bedrock | that revel the bedrock fondness, desperation and loyalty that bond this or any other frazzled clan.
• shipshape | ...shipshape and affluent little city state [Singapore].
• headmaster
• gridlock | ...A gridlock in the justice system.
• derail | Lack of stimulation and nurturing at an early age can derail development.
• firebrand | He is the guinea pig of medical sadists and firebrand communists.
• rundown | Kheifetz provided Elizabeth Zarubin with a rundown on all the members of Robert Oppenheimer's family.
• afoot
• backbite
• backbone
• backslide
• barnstorming
• cesspool
• doubleheader
• forsake
• gangway
• grandstand
• hotshot
• outstrip
• overhaul
• overweening
• piebald
• stopcock
• turnaround
• upend
• walkout
Page Created:1995. © 1995-2005 by Xah Lee.