Vocabulary Study: Writer's Words List

She is saucy and heedless at first, headstrong when she shouldn't be, but smart, and able to learn.

Suspicion fell quickly on a possible culprit in the Philippines, in part because the virus' eight pages of computer code contained a tantalizing word: Barok. A search of virus registries quickly revealed that it was the name of a so-called Trojan horse, a stealthy software program that filches passwords, written by a Filipino hacker last year. Still, the transparency of this clue suggested that the word might have been inserted as a deliberate smoke screen to fool the computer sleuths.

In A.D. 3034, the universe is ruled by Drej, translucent, electric-blue beings of pure energy and malefic power.

If there's such a thing as being fired vicariously, it happened to me last Wednesday.

it is apparent that you not only have a poor diction, but also wanting of erudition. The sea of your will and ignorance, seethes and fumes like a boiling pot of piss.

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.

... 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.

scoot is what scooters do — scooting around; scouting is what boy scout do — scouting around.

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.

as in notarized document, used in legal docs.

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. But Walters says the Ramseys believed the cameras had stopped.

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.

“... posting prodigious off-topic vagaries on this newsgroup.”

in theater, the seaters are ushers. These ushers ushers you to your seat.

“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.”

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!’”

“... the fawning, greased, obsequious leer ...”