Wordy Blog Archive 2012-11

Today's words: facetious, antagonist, poignant, pervasive, erudite, putative, estranged, affinity, inundate, rejoice

Usage examples: SAT words

Make a sentence out of them!

My putative antagonist, an estranged classmate, is an erudite jokester with an affinity for facetious yet poignant persiflage, and who will rejoice if his pervasive stench manages to innundate my senses to the point where I am unable to concentrate on my play.

Beverley Eyre,

Score: 100!

Ten difficult words, GRE words: prognosis, surreptitiously, clandestinely, fetid, inarticulate, peonage, nebulous, compunction, snub, amity.

GRE Words

These are university graduate level. Good for GRE takers. Make a sentence out of them.

The state doctor, mumbling inarticulately while staring surreptitiously at the nebulous, yet fetid growth dangling off the patient's nose, had no compunction about faking a prognosis while clandestinely filing a secret report with his superiors, thus condeming this poor fool to eternal peonage for the act of ignoring the amity of his superior and snubbing his attempts at comraderie.

Beverley Eyre,

Today's words: depraved, immune, subsistence, imbue, deft, subjugate, honorific, secession, precipitation, expedient.

Usage examples: SAT words

Make a sentence out of them!

Today's words: blasphemy, tumultuous, postulate, lopsidedness, debauched, nuanced, autonomous, reticence, malevolent, candor.

Usage examples: SAT words

These are highschool-level. Good for SAT takers. Make a sentence out of them.

Today's words: animosity, clandestine, trove, reprimand, repercussions, lucrative, affable, tenuous, coveted, scourge.

Usage examples: SAT words

These are highschool-level. Good for SAT takers. Make a sentence out of them.

Ten highschool-level words: cartel, minions, portending, monumental, loin, gaunt, debauchery, eminent, decorum, insurrection.

Usage examples: SAT words

Make a sentence out of them.

Vocabulary review: abjectly, hermetic, relinquish, apprehend, precipitously, anecdotal, elucidated, harrowing, contentious, repercussions.

Usage examples: SAT words

These are high-school level. If you are studying SAT for college, you better know them all. Make a sentence out of them.

Chinese Phrase: Voluptuous as to Drip 娇艳欲滴

updated: Accent Marks: Trema, Umlaut, Macron, Circumflex

Vocabulary review: disdain, jocular, trespass, bolster, insufferable, confidante, parsimonious, mayhem, sally, proclivity

Make a sentence out of them.

Usage examples: SAT words

Answer to last review: I gleaned the etiquette from the contemporaneous period relentlessly and found inexorable reprise of vitriol that repeal the restive revisionists. SAT words

My frontpage got a facelift. Let me know what you think, ya all!

Today's words: restive, contemporaneous, relentlessly, vitriol, inexorably, glean, repeal, reprise, revisionist, etiquette.

Try to make a sentence using all of them.

Usage examples: SAT words

Real Time Speech Translation with Same Voice, English to Chinese by Machine

Schadenfreude, Roman holiday, morose delectation, gloat, lulz

Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude /ˈʃɑːdənfrɔɪdə/ (German: [ˈʃaːdənˌfʁɔʏdə]) is pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. This German word is used as a loanword in English and some other languages, and has been calqued in Danish and Norwegian as skadefryd and in Swedish as skadeglädje and Finnish as vahingonilo.

An English expression with a similar meaning is “Roman holiday”, a metaphor taken from the poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by George Gordon, Lord Byron, where a gladiator in Ancient Rome expects to be “butcher'd to make a Roman holiday” while the audience would take pleasure from watching his suffering. The term suggests debauchery and disorder in addition to sadistic enjoyment.

Another phrase with a meaning similar to Schadenfreude is “morose delectation” (“delectatio morosa” in Latin), meaning “the habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts”. The medieval church taught that morose delectation was a sin. French writer Pierre Klossowski maintained that the appeal of sadism is morose delectation.

An English word of similar meaning is “gloating”, where “gloat” is defined as “to observe or think about something with triumphant and often malicious satisfaction, gratification, or delight” (gloat over an enemy's misfortune). Gloating is differentiated from Schadenfreude in that it does not necessarily require malice (one may gloat to a friend about having defeated him in a game without ill intent) and that it describes an action rather than a state of mind (one typically gloats to the subject of the misfortune or to a third party).

In Internet culture, “lulz” has a very similar meaning of getting laughter out of people's misfortune.

Calque

In linguistics, a calque (/ˈkælk/) or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word (Latin: “verbum pro verbo”) or root-for-root translation.

Shit Southern Women Say (slang, accent, Humor) 📺

cockamamie

Before we get started, there are a few things you oughta know about me. I'm 29, no kids, and I live in a smallish apartment in Seattle with my boyfriend, who has kindly agreed to go along with these cockamamie schemes. We've got no garden space and one car between the two of us.
Meet the Greenie Pig By Elisabeth Kwak-Hefferan. At http://grist.org/green-living-tips/2011-09-22-meet-the-greenie-pig/

A Dilemma in English Grammar of Plurality

“women's rights” or “woman's rights”?

Technically, i think it's more correct to say “woman's”. But there comes a logical conundrum. “woman's” seems to imply a single female, while “women's” implies all female. So, if you write “women's”, the meaning for all female is embedded, clear to all, including the massive number of people whose native language is not English, yet also clearly understandable and non-intrusive to native speakers (most won't even notice, except the handful and loud “grammar nazis”)

what do you think?

See also: The Meddling Of The English Plurality On Meaning.

Polyglot: Young Man Speaks 20 Languages 📺