• saucy | She is saucy and heedless at first, headstrong when she shouldn't be, but smart, and able to learn.
• sleuth | ... as a deliberate smoke screen to fool the computer sleuths. [Time Mag, 2000/5/15]
• malefic | In A.D. 3034, the universe is ruled by Drej, translucent, electric-blue beings of pure energy and malefic power. [Time Mag, on sci-fi movie Titan A.E., 2000/06/19]
• vicariously | If there's such a thing as being fired vicariously, it happened to me last Wednesday. [Time Mag, James Poniewozik, 2000/06/19]
• fume | it is apparent that you not only have a poor diction, but also wanting of erudition. The sea of your will and knowledge, seethes and fumes like a boiling pot of piss. [Xah Lee in comp.lang.lisp, 26 Apr 2000 23:09:37 -0700]
• eloquent | What? Eloquent philosophical diatribe is your forte? I hardly see you open your mouth against the wind, but more likely the wind blew it open at times. [Xah Lee]
• prolix | ... And, when you are accosted by a jaunty man of prolix gripes and dire agendas, not only lisp ain't his scheme, but the only one. [Xah Lee on comp.lang.lisp, 25 Jun 2000 04:57:49 -0700]
• scoot | scoot is what scooters do — scooting around; scouting is what boy scout do — scouting around.
• logorrhea | I thought I said that: I concluded that Dylan was a waste of time. What kept me interested in it for a while was the Lisp-like syntax. I didn't find the semantics and the “feature set” sufficiently attractive on their own, and knowing how fixed-grammer languages evolve (rampant keyworditis and logorrhea), didn't appear to be something worth investing in at the time. [Erik Naggum on comp.lang.lisp; 01 Jul 2000 13:16:19 +0000]
• notarize | as in notarized document, used in legal docs.
• verily
• treacly | At one point, Patsy leans over in tears onto John's shoulder, and he mumbles something treacly—and acted?—about JonBenet being “with us” in spirit. [Time Mag. JOHN CLOUD 2000/03/12]
• murmur
• travesty | dada n. 1. A European artistic and literary movement (1916-1923) that flouted conventional aesthetic and cultural values by producing works marked by nonsense, travesty, and incongruity.
• venal
• vagary | “... posting prodigious off-topic vagaries on this newsgroup.” [Xah Lee]
• usher | in theater, the seaters are ushers. These ushers ushers you to your seat.
• refractory | “Some half dozen persons have written technically on combinatory logic, and most of these, including ourselves, have published something erroneous. Since some of our fellow sinners are among the most careful and competent logicians on the contemporary scene, we regard this as evidence that the subject is refractory. Thus fullness of exposition is necessary for accuracy; and excessive condensation would be false economy here, even more than it is ordinarily.” [Haskell B. Curry and Robert Feys in the Preface to Combinatory Logic [2], May 31, 1956]
• putrescence | For Edgar Allan Poe, dying did not necessarily leave a person speechless. Take “The Case of M. Valdemar.” The title character, his body decomposing into “a nearly liquid mass of loathsome — of detestable putrescence,” still manages enough tongue to beg the narrator, a mesmerist, to stop messing with him. “‘For God's sake! — quick! — quick! — put me to sleep — or, quick! — waken me! — quick! — I say to you that I am dead!’” [a passage on Edgar Allan Poe.]
• malinger | call in sick people
• ilk | derogatory sort of type
• pique | “his writings piqued my interest in poetry ...”
• obsequious | “... the fawning, greased, obsequious leer ...” [dialogue from film _Clockwork Orange_]
• discomfit.
• discomfit.
• natal | as in prenatal
• ingrate
• ingest | ingest, then digest.
• ineluctable
• interim | Steve Jobs for a while has the title of Interim CEO at Apple, and among Apple fans as iCEO (iMac).
• instate | install
• hullabaloo | “blame Canada... with all their hockey hullabaloo” [movie South Park lyrics]
• emasculating | The mature American male is an idiot unable to cope with the emasculating competitive careerism of women (itself a laughable charade)... [The Subtle Stink That Mars ‘American Beauty’
• auteurs | Auteurs everywhere are trying to break into show biz by doing it themselves—and putting it online. Now they just have to get you to watch. [time.com, 2000/03/05, ROMESH RATNESAR AND JOEL STEIN]
• ascetic | “So I was wondering why call/cc is not implemented.”, Answer[because the Common Lisp crowd doesn't want you to implement manually all the control flow mechanisms that CALL/CC is used to implement, and that is because there is no desire to pare the language down to “essentials” or Scheme's ascetic/anorectic notions of “elegance”] [newsgroup posting on comp.lang.lisp by Erik Naggum]
• matriculate
• nebulous | cloudy, as in nebula
• unduly
• unction
• presages | If any feminist cultural critics want to wring their hands over Oxygen's media offerings, they should be doing so not because it's so banal, but because it presages a spectacular failure for a high-profile female's business venture. [from time mag, i think.]
• legerdemain
• leeward
• orotund
• ululate | In H. G. Well's _War of the World_ the martians ululate for their impinging death.
• orgiastic | Recently i learned what is pajama party. I can it is an orgiastic feast.
• malignity
• poach | poach eggs, parboil potato. | simmer, bake, boil, fry, steam, microwave, roast, barbecue, grill, stir-fry
• omnivorous
• muddle | don't muddle my song
• ruse | “what a ruse!”
• simper | simpering kid
• litigant
• oblate | oblong, spheroid
• simian
• sufferance
• obstreperous | As a practical matter, it occurs to me that Ms. Lopez's strategy in wearing such a costume, exposing almost her entire front, was to redirect attention from her rear, which had been the subject of so much obstreperous commentary. [Lance Morrow in Time Mag., 2000/03]
• malapropism
• magniloquent
• lusty
• lout
• lope
• sidereal
• loll
• swaddle | mummies are swaddled.
• locus | like focus, a concentration
• svelte | Beattie at 22, svelte and winsome. [description of a photo of a girl]
• astringent | Turn now to Frances Kiernan's Mary McCarthy biography, called “Seeing Mary Plain” (Norton, $35, 939 pages), an overlong but riveting portrait of a brilliant literary celebrity and minor writer two or three generations back. McCarthy was a beautiful woman of tart tongue and astringent mind who made her ambitious way amid a splendid cast of literary characters during decades when reading and writing still meant something [Lance Morrow in Time Mac. 2000/03]
• requiem | when i think of requiem, i think of Mozart's requiem
• lank
• stuporous | adjective of stupor. Like torpor, one of the gifts of drugs
• lambent
• reprehensible
• laity
• paramount | all impotent, like Paramount Pictures
• regency
• juggernaut | Microsoft is a juggernaut, so is unix. (Unix morons, get that!)
• quizzical | when i winked, she looked quizzical, and when i raised my eyebrow, she winked. The whole incident is quite quizzical to those blind.
• rubicund | reddish, of checks
• paraphernalia | personal baggage
• galvanize | modern love in S&M circles are galvanized, literally.
• privy | Accusing someone of having a “dysfunctional brain” isn't belittling them? Unless the person has a clinical mental deficiency (a fact that I don't think any of us are privy to about most other posters), this is clearly intended as an insult [Barry Magolin on comp.lang.lisp, 2000/08]
• wrest
• wield
• vanquished | “Titus Andronicus” was no doubt Lecter's favorite Shakespeare play, opening as it does with Titus returning to Rome with the corpses of 21 of his sons and their four surviving brothers, and pausing in his victory speech only long enough to condemn the eldest son of Tamora, vanquished queen of the Goths, to be hacked limb from limb, and the pieces thrown on a fire. [by movie critic ROGER EBERT, on Julie Taymor's Titus 1999]
• milquetoast | A quick note to our readers: As you've undoubtedly noticed, here at TIME.com we've taken the liberty of using the word “asshole” in its entirety (except in headlines). First, we figure that reporting the news means telling the whole story, and, second, it strikes us as a bit prissy to ignore the actual wording of a quote in favor of a milquetoast replica. [2000/09/06 time.com, about George W. Bush made the blunder of calling someone asshole unawaring it went through microphone.]
• vitreous
• innuendo | American media are filled with sick sex and violence innuendos, while the righteous cry out of web censorship for the protection of children.
• pronouncement | sexual acts are most natural without pronouncements
• sequent
• protractile | cats are equipped with protractile claws
• vernal
• iota | i have not an iota of schooling, nevertheless i have a lot to say, and my babbling irradiates nescience
• promissory | a note of promise
• presbyter | church stuff. ecclesiastical...
• abstemious
• prattle | the prattling business of housewives
• noisome
• nonplus | I'm nonplussed by your nominal exhibition
• apprise | Yet when apprised of Whitestone's remark about ASL being limiting, Doshi says...
• fluster | America's losing fight against fat — one sure to fluster consumers as they frantically scan the nutritional labels on supermarket shelves — comes from the Boston University Medical Center.
• wallop | ...is an former amateur prizefighter who puts a wallop in his prose.
• continence | abstinence, self-denial, temperance, sobriety
• ponderous | weighty
• periphery | boundary, perimeter.
• duplicity | deceit.
• mordant | the ironist with muscles and the mordant fabulist...
• platitude | cliché, bromide, commonplace, truism
• adjunct | appendage, appurtenance, accessory, attachment.
• contingent | accidental, fortuitous, incidental, adventitious. | by contingency, you discovered the exigency of my words
• intransigence | Programmers can be very stubborn — Stallman, to be sure, is legendary for his intransigence. [article about Free Software movement]
• chutzpah | ... indeed, it requires a special degree of chutzpah to write an entirely new version of one of the most famous programs in the free software arsenal. [article about Free Software movement]
• cojones | “What's your background that you have the cojones to try something like this?” [cojones means a man's testicles in Spanish. See Cojones↗]
• prescriptive | “My PhD dissertation was entitled Prescriptive Kanji Simplification.”
• promulgate | [pinyin was] Promulgated in 1958 [by People's Republic of China]. (Pinyin is a Chinese romanization system. To romanizatize a language means to make a transliteration system using latin alphabets. That is, using English letters to represent Chinese pronunciation.)
• litany | ... People keep asking me, “Why a camel?” And I have a standard litany of answers. (I'm allowed to give more than one answer, of course, because of the Perl Slogan: “There's More Than One Way To Do It!”) .... [Larry Wall, on History of Perl.]
• garble | ... don't garble what you don't understand. [from unicode FAQ]
• feral | the cubs are still having a bit of trouble adjusting to their new non-feral life.
• atone | ...It was dropped after the 1997 model year. But while Toyota makes mistakes, it seems to make them only once, not only learning from its errors, but also atoning for them by correcting shortcomings. [car review article.]
• vigil | “I'm on y2k vigil.”
• corral | All you need to do is walk into any bar or party with it, and corral the first girl you see... [an article on picking up girls]
• progeny | The story of Anna Leonowens, British tutor to the numerous progeny of testy King Mongkut, ruler of 19th century Siam... slightly prissy but good-hearted 20th century liberal. ...Of course, since they started telling and retelling this story, miscegenation has become a nonstarter as a cause for sundering true love. [Richard Schickel of Time Mag. on movie Anna and the King.]
• miscegenation | One would never have known that his staff had had to forcibly drag him to this new position of genial toleration of computer miscegenation.
• polemics | Despite a myriad problems, ours [the year 2000] is a better, more hopeful world than it was in 1942, when humanity wallowed in violence, justified by frantic polemics.
• dour | A large number of rather dour folks seem to have concluded (reluctantly, I hope) that Adolf Hitler was the most significant figure of this century, because he caused the biggest ruckus and slaughtered lots of people. [web rant]
• dotard | “... you dotard, all do is to squabble with me.”
• dialectical | As the literary critic and prominent Kinsey Report reviewer Lionel Trilling suggested back in the 1940s, American culture is nothing if not dialectical. [from http://www.suck.com/daily/98/10/09/]
• jihad | the new hacker's jihad. [title of a section of an article. (the war between Free Software and Microsoft.)] | There also seems to be a Jihad going on between GNU Emacs and Xemacs. [from the web]
• indolent | Definition of wallow: To roll the body about indolently or clumsily in or as if in water, snow, or mud.
• prolix | ... (sarcastically) Well, that should be a blistering, prolix rant to look forward to.
• droll | I couldn't begin to imagine how the arid world of over-lit computer labs and humming server rooms could have produced someone so much droller and more insightful than my fellow humanities graduates. [a literature student talking about a unix hacker.]
• destitution | ...prevention of destitution...
• prevision | ...I am speaking of fear as an irrational passion, not of the rational prevision of possible misfortune. [Bertrand Russell in What I Believe]
• sow | Java lets you create methods that have the same name as the class, but that are not constructors. Exploit this to sow confusion. [on writing obfuscated code.]
• lurch | ...Development at NCSA had stalled after the package's original creator, Rob McCool, left the Center. If that happened to a proprietary product [as opposed to OpenSource], it would just die, leaving all its users in the lurch. [an article on Software forking with relation to GPL license]
• peon | Mr. President, if I may speak freely, the Russkie talks big, but frankly, we think he's short of know-how. I mean, you just can't expect a bunch of ignorant peons to understand a machine like some of our boys. (from film ‘Dr. Strange Love’, 1964)
• genteel | Quilty, dazed and gasping, drags himself to find cover behind a Victorian watercolor painting of an 18th century genteel young woman - the portrait is propped up against the wall in the hallway. [describing a scene in Stanley Kubrick's 1962 Lolita.]
• tuft | After a fade-in on satiny drapes, a young girl's bare left foot is offered up. In a timely identification, the word ‘Lolita’ appears superimposed along the top of the foot. The cushioning left hand (wearing a wedding ring) of a subservient male cradles her foot and his right hand lovingly and devotedly paints her toenails - at intervals, he puts cotton tufts between her toes. [describing the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962)]
• rigmarole | I felt that the education system has become a bureaucratic rigmarole and people forget the goal of education. American school system is now a pestering fashionable business full-fledged with political trendies. —Xah Lee.
• concupiscence | It attempts to render concupiscence innocuous by confining it within the bounds of matrimony. —Bertrand Russell
• apologist | The Christian apologists ...
• profundity | I can, however, imagine the modern liberal theologian maintaining with an air of profundity that all creation is miraculous, so that he no longer needs to fasten upon certain occurrences as special evidence of Diven intervention. —Bertrand Russell on Christianity.
• emasculation | The gradual emasculation of the Christian doctrine has been effected in spite of the most vigorous resistance, and solely as the result of the onslaughts of freethinkers. —Bertrand Russell on Christianity.
• obscurantist | ...But the Buddhist priesthood — as it exists, for example, in Tibet — has been obscurantist, tyrannous, and cruel in the highest degree. —Bertrand Russell in “Has religion made useful contributions to civilization” 1930.
• knell | the death knell of MicroSoft.
• usurious | I began selling things for friends, taking a nearly usurious 60 percent cut of the action for auctioning off their old stereo equipment, beaded purses, Ted Williams autographed pix, neon signs, vintage Boy Scout hats, and whatnot.
• knave | “Sire Gibson, forgive me, but why does lord steward wish to march on a geek stronghold?”. “Knave! You insult the lady with your ignorance!”. (from After Y2K comics by Nitrozac)
• jilt |
• meretricious | Definition for poetaster: writer of insignificant, meretricious, or shoddy poetry.
• cavort | There he was preparing to cavort in the buff with Andie MacDowell...But for him the occasion proved mortifying. | (Tom) Cruise attends a floating sex party where masked participants cavort. [Time Mag. on film Eyes Wide Shut.]
• saturnalia | In all these encounters eros and thanatos are exquisitely mixed. The dead body of the first woman's father is clearly visible as she confesses her confused passion; the prostitute turns out to be under the threat of AIDS; the orgiasts, resenting William's intrusion on their saturnalia, threaten him with humiliation and death, and he is “redeemed” only by the intervention of a mysterious woman, who pays for his life with her own. [Time Mag, on film Eyes Wide Shut.]
• disport | ... and, finally, in the movie's central sequence, he succeeds in invading a secret orgy, where masked couples disport themselves sexually in a display that is more grim than wanton. [Time Mag, on the film Eyes Wide Shut.]
• ingenue | With the film's sensational response at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the actress changed her look from frumpy slacker to sleek ingenue and has been on a whirlwind of studio meetings. (Time Mag on the film Blair Witch Project)
• gander | “Everyone turns and takes a gander at the yokels” —Garrison
• invective | He [Marque de Sade] defied them [morality], chronicling his defiance in volume after volume of denunciation and invective, liberally interwoven with sexual outrages of one kind or another.
• woozy | in an ecstasy, girls swoon, men get woozy...
• portmanteau | portmanteau words, worth a chortle.
• slog | In summary, almost every concern that you might think of has already been (at least) thought about. In a perfect world, every concern could be addressed perfectly. But in this world we just have to slog through.
• angst | Totally '90s in its preoccupation with angst and property values,...
• chink | ...aimed at a chink in the Supreme Court's rulings...
• churlish | often abuse by the churlish multimillionaires they judge, umpires...
• rickety | [Steve] Jobs had to run through the demonstration without giving any hint of the rickety state of the software. With the auditorium full, the lights were dimmed, and at 9:39, while in the wings his crew had gathered and chanted a good-luck mantra, “Please don't fuck up, please don't fuck up,”,... — “The NeXT Thing” (a book)
• snippet | ...but I instantly disliked them as being superficial, unedifying and self-indulgent. Subsequently I read snippets of interviews and came to the conclusion that he was insincere as well.
• haze | Marine Pfc. William T. Santiago, stationed at Guantanamo, Cuba, just did not measure up to the high standards set by the U.S. Marine Corps. He is killed in a hazing incident perpetrated by Pfc. Lawson Downey and Lance Cpl. Harold W. Dawson. (about the movie A Few Good Men)
• politicos | And while the politicos blame the hoi polloi for the nation's difficulties, they are protecting the real perpetrators — the powerful rich old white men who have actually caused all the problems.
• padre | Your problem, the Padre said, is...
• bimestrial | I'm writing bimestrial review on it.
• altercation | He [J.J.Sylvester] was a professor at the U. of Virginia for three months until an altercation with a student led to his resignation.
• barrister | One of his [J.J.Sylvester] books is The Laws of Verse, and for many years in England he was a barrister.
• albatross | Clinton's albatross — now that Gennifer Flower's accusations of adultery have receded into the half-life of media memory — is his convoluted account of dealings with his Arkansas draft board back in 1969...and his responses amount to a tortuous thicket of incomplete and not entirely compatible explanations.
• dote | He dotes on well-turned literary phrases ... | She was the precocious child of doting parents in Sin City.
• flummox | The audience, thoroughly flummoxed,...
• hokum | “(computer art is) technological hokum that's neither art nor science.”
• horripilation | ...a horripilation of the sexual reflex that is perfectly captured by the word creep.
• soporific | hypnagogic | Mozart's music is a repetitive, soporific bore.
• jamboree | like a jamboree of the Indian nations in Montana long ago — a pandemonium of patriarchy,...
• maelstrom | culture's maelstrom of images.
• manumit | emancipate
• quiddities | Ira Holloway is a man who loves women, adores their quiddities,...
• shimmy | he'll be the one shimmying up to me with an opening line (of picking up girls).
• smidgen | a smidgen of genius, a sliver of cutting truth.
• gawky | He says you go along for hours not hearing when you are spoken to and acting like a gawky girl.
• melee | The gunman also died in the melee (shootout).
• lucubration | I have no wish to think that the world results from the lucubrations of Hegel .... —Bertrand Russell
• dossier | ...scientists who seek some sign of it must search the dossier of human activity for conduct that cycles with the seasons and might be linked with sexuality.
• hobnob | ...to confer, converse, and otherwise hobnob with my brother wizards.
• traipse | to traipsing outside his office building whenever he wants a few puffs (of cigarettes). [Time Mag.]
• unprepossessing | ...which was located in an unprepossessing brownstone at that address.
• runty | If Sun was a sumo wrestler, then NeXT was a runty kid barely tall enough to kick it in the shins.
• vertiginous | ...the company [Sun Microsystems] was perfectly positioned to sustain its vertiginous rate of growth.
• bombastic | In an era in which so much political art borders on the bombastic, Maya Lin's sculptures speak quietly but always evocatively, reminding Americans of their common bonds.
• fogey | I am an old ASCII fogey, and don't use CIM. [CompuServer poster m.j.vasko]
• wunderkind | Unlike most of the fire-breathing Soviet wunderkinder, though, Richter came to the piano late... [Time Mag?] | ...[uncovered recordings] were released earlier this fall with the imprimatur of the temperamental pianist. [Time Mag?]
• swill | ...amply supported by the public's craving for the latest swill.
• scruffy | Handsomely scruffy, beguilingly elliptical Jordan Catalano [actor] is familiar to legions of smart teenage girls...[he] has become a heartthrob.
• risibility | There's the rub: The sexual encounter between Douglas and Moore teeters on the brink of risibility.
• umbrage | As a COBOL programer in good standing, I take umbrage with your remarks about languages other than C.
• haberdashery | Sam Rothstein favors sports jackets in blinding solids — sometimes in the primary hues, sometimes in less-than-subtle pastels. These he color-coordinates with silky haberdashery and alligator loafers dyed to match. [about the movie Casino 1995]
• toady | I am furious at Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania's career-senator. He's played the game so long he's forgotten the goal. He thinks his job is to stay in his job. He's a toady and he'll do anything for the GOP. Need a Republican to repeal the laws of physics? Get Arlen.
• infernal | They [vampires] are enslaved by bloodlust: every night a little death. They lean into the victim's necks and give them the hickey from hell, the infernal overbite — the kiss that bleeds. [Time Mag?]
• sinecure | A generous retirement package helped persuade Lee to leave his comfortable sinecure in Berkeley [as a professor] and take on the challenge of leading Academia Sinica [in Taiwan].
• hammy | Jack Barry, host of Twenty-One, rehearses to himself before the show like some hammy dinner-theater thespian.
huckster | It's perfect when you think about it. The self-promoting, fuzzy-minded bullshit that the Wired Magazine generation laps up, all in one package: bad science, cheap new age philosophy, hucksterism, logrolling, and greed. Now in a familiar form known as “vitamin fraud”. [jwz's online diary, 20031103]
• hawker | Apparently unfulfilled by her new status as Home Shopping Network hawker, bad novelist and celebrity divorcéé, Ivana Trump has decided to acquire the ultimate accessory: a millionaire European husband. ...a suavely hunky Italian engineer and her boyfriend of three years... [source: probably from time mag]| AOL Hawks Cheap PC to Lure Subscribers [online news caption, 20031204]
• captivate | ...the two were instantly captivated with each other when they met at a party in 1986 and subsequently engaged in sleep-overs at the princess's [palace]... [source: probably time mag]
• gubernatorial | “He will say and do anything to get elected.” —Connecticut gubernatorial candidate Tom Scott on his opponent John Rowland.
• decrepitude | Doglegs of decrepitude: John Updike's fine new book of stories looks at boys grown old.
• splurge | As long as we're on the subject, I want to put in a plug for buying a book: “The Insider's Guide to the Colleges.” It is more interesting and candid, and isn't one of those facts-and-figures books like Barron's, Petersons, etc. Go out and spend the $18 for a new copy - splurge! You will only go to college once!
• piffle | “Oh, piffle!”| ...your talk is piffle.
• libertine | From Mozart's Don Giovanni to Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress, the figure of the libertine, that politically incorrect swine, has swaggered provocatively through 200 years of operatic history. Cads, bounders and rakehells abound onstage: one thinks not only of the lecherous Don and Tom Rakewell but of Nerone, Pinkerton and Eugene Onegin as well-moral reprobates who give hardly a second thought to the consequences of their actions.
• addle | A distressing number of my readers, however, evidently addled by the siren song of “the third word,” were unable to read my plea for surcease, and so the deluge of “gry” continued.
• swank | While staying at Manhattan's swank Mark Hotel,...
• epigone | Surely there are other philosophies — Hitler and his epigones in Bosnia represent one...
• tyro | don't act like an expert when you're a tyro.
• cagey | That rowdy farce, cagily directed by Tom Shadyac,...
• rowdy | ...had to contend with a group of drunken rowdies who caused a near riot at the school.
• reprisal | In the days when execution was mainly a reprisal, inflicting maximum suffering was a legitimate objective.
• garrotte | Hanging developed tangentially from garroting and strangulation...
• febrile | ...has been an occasion for intense interest and sometimes febrile arguments.
• miscue | Ordinarily, a few miscues with a resupply ship would not create such suspense...
• subsume | “Higher algebraic curves” would nowadays be subsumed under “algebraic geometry”... [math text book]
• chanteuse | the slimy Dorian Tyrel (Peter Greene), who runs the Coco Bongo Club, where of course Tina is the slinky chanteuse. [Time mag, about the movie Mask]
• vivisection | “That is vivisection”, said Asia Watch researcher...
• dignitary | Mercurial and erratic, Kim Jong Il rarely meets foreign dignitaries...
• jostling | ...DigiCom, the software company where they're jostling for position...their case starts to become more singular than paradigmatic. [Time Mag.]
• bishopric | diocese
• scion | he surrounds himself with the scions of his father's wartime comrades,...
• barrio | Now high school graduation is virtually automatic for adolescent outside the ghettos and barrios, a college education is these days a mere rite of passage, a capstone to adolescent party time.
• expletive | RTFM: Read the (expletive) Manual! [comp tech jargon]
• coeval | Surely with mankind the appreciation of flowers must have been coeval with the poetry of love.
• revue | ...entirely elegant revue of card conjuring... [Time mag.] | ...he wrote and performed in satirical revues.
• bolster | The scientific skepticism is bolstered by some unusual firsthand evidence.
• burgher | ...then forced by these same burghers to fight other shit...
• tenement | ...to be spray painted on a tenement wall.
• purview | What was once the purview of priests and analysts, who try to probe the mind by listening and observing, is now a frontier for neuroscientists, who use blood tests, brain scans and spinal taps.
• mascot | ...he [Simpson's Dad] has been a monorail conductor and a baseball mascot.
• habiliments | ...and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave.
• vesture | His vesture was dabbled in blood.
• retrenchment | ...since United Airlines kicked off the retrenchments late last year...
• chattel | ...such a distortion...that two human lives can be disposed of for chattel.
• slue | the car slued to the side.
• piddling | In the vast arena of international commerce, the action will seem piddling...
• quibbles | Although puns at their worst can be mere piddling quibbles, at best they can sharply point to surprising but genuine resemblance.
• dapper | a dapper man was ...
• founder | how their first marriages had foundered in seas of conjugal miscommunication.
• feisty | critics question whether IBM has truly developed a plan that will enable it to compete in the long run against feisty and fast-moving rivals... | A spoof of Wagner's opera cycle is feisty but crude.
• cartel | This interdependence [of Oligopoly economic model] among firms leads to actions not found in the other market structures, such as advertising campaigns directed toward a specific rival, cartels and collusion, cost-plus pricing, most-favored-customer pricing, and other behaviors.
• winnow | I've downloaded the vocabulary portion of your site, and am in the process of winnowing it for unfamiliar words: I have to exercise vigilance against plateau-ing out in my accretion of vocabulary, which complacency is a hazard when rarely encountering a truly unknown word. [fan email, from PK, 2000-08]
• roil | The controversy provides a vivid example of the crosscurrents that roil IBM.
• quip | No person of feeling, quipped Oscar Wilde, could read Dicken's account of the death of Little Nell without laughing.
• rut | (sexual heat) | ...and if they aren't in rut that night, nothing happens.
• confetti | The packets were then released like so much confetti into the web of interconnected computers.
• argot | the criminal classes and otherwise illiterate people evolved their own argot to serve as both a private code and...
• simulacrum | ...would be a corporatized simulacrum of the original festival.
• slog | ...but this starts looking like plain hard slog.
• crux | now we are getting into the crux of the matter.
• jingle | ...a jingle he was taught in school.
• ditty | “Here's a little ditty that you really ought to know: horses ‘sweat’ and men ‘perspire,’ but ladies only ‘glow.’”
• miasma | there's a miasma of suspicion about families and ...
• travelog | At heart, though, Aladdin (the movie) and its kin were the merest, dearest emotional travelogues. They alighted on a dream here, a resentment there...
• oleaginous | ...who with oleaginous irony hides his intentions to kill Mufasa and Simba and become a low-down, schemin', lyin' king...
• unctuous | fulsome, oily, oleaginous, smarmy
• gaff | companies have also apologized for recent gaffes that...
• offing | there is even a rumor of a baby in the offing.
• alchemize | The computer wizards at Industrial Light and Magic help alchemize this ragged film into a metamorphic extravaganza.
• nix | he nixed it.
• dross | with so many ... on the market, how do you separate the gold from the dross.
• tyke | scamp, gamine, guttersnipe. | “when i was a little tyke, my father ...”
• sham | For the past few weeks gossipists have been gumming that the seemingly cheery union between Richard Gere and Cindy Crawford is a sham.
• lilt | And when you gaze upon a Monet or call to mind a lilting line of verse, they bring you warmth. [describing feelings]
• dally | dillydally, flirt, dally, play, toy, trifle | ... Frank Sinatra dallied with Nancy Reagon... [Time Mag., 20010205]
• plebeian | American Express “card members” began weighing the costs of privilege against the benefits of more plebeian credit cards.
• succor | Frankly, with my heart palpitating, i'm seeing myself ready as the next offer to the Netiquette gods. What is it you say? Some people are just doomed? (all ye dark Gothic chicks, come out and succor me.) [Xah Lee, 2003-01, online forum].
• ragamuffin | In the author's comparison of her book to an illegitimate ragamuffin, we may be struck by the details...
• emetic | I'm a lot more productive on my Indy than on my NT box with four times the horsepower. The NT interface is great for its emetic properties, though. [unix fanatic.]
• pygmy | ...which, funnily enough, are pygmies by modern standards. [referring to an obsolete computer operating system]
Page Created:1995. © 1995-2005 by Xah Lee.