#17 blight ~ burlesque Flashcards
blight
/blaɪt/
n. a disease in plants; anything that injures or destroys
- An early frost proved a blight to the citrus crops last year, so we had no orange juice for breakfast.
blithe
/blaɪð, blaɪθ/
adj. carefree; cheerful
- The blithe birds in the garden were making so much noise that Jamilla began to think about the shotgun in the attic.
- The children were playing blithely next to the hazardous-waste dump. While they played, they were blithely unaware that they were doing sth. dangerous.
- To be blithely ignorant is to be happily unaware.
bourgeois
/bʊərˈʒwɑ, ˈbʊərʒwɑ; French burˈʒwa/
adj. middle class, usually in a pejorative sense; boringly conventional
The original bourgeoisie were simply people who lived in cities, an innovation at the time. They weren’t farmers and they weren’t nobles. They were members of a new class - the middle-class.
Now the word is used mostly in making fun of or sneering at people who seem to think about nothing but their possessions and other comforts and about conforming with other people who share those concerns.
- A hip young city dweller might reject life in the suburbs as being too bourgeois.
- A person whose dream is to have a swimming pool in his backyard might be called bourgeois by someone who thinks there are more important things in life.
- Golf is often referred to as a bourgeois sport.
bovine
/ˈboʊvaɪn, -vɪn, -vin/
adj. cow related; cowlike
- Cows are bovine, obviously. Eating brass is a bovine concern.
canine
/ˈkeɪnaɪn/
adj. dog related
equine
/ˈikwaɪn, ˈɛkwaɪn/
adj. horse-related
feline
/ˈfilaɪn/
adj. cat-related
piscine
/ˈpaɪsin, ˈpɪsaɪn, -in, -ɪn/
adj. fish-related
porcine
/ˈpɔrsaɪn, -sɪn/
adj. pig-related
ursine
/ˈɜrsaɪn, -sɪn/
adj. bear-related
brevity
/ˈbrɛvɪti/
n. briefness
- The audience was deeply grateful for the brevity of the after-dinner speaker’s remarks.
- The reader of this book may be grateful for the brevity of this example.
Brevity is related to the word abbreviate.
broach
/broʊtʃ/
v. to open up a subject for discussion, often a delicate subject
- Henrietta was proud of her new dress, so no one knew how to broach the subject with her of how silly grandmothers look in leather.
bucolic
/byuˈkɒlɪk/
adj. charmingly rural; rustic; countrylike
- The changing of the autumn leaves, old stones walls, distant views, and horses grazing in green meadows are examples of bucolic splendor.
- The bucolic scene didn’t do much for the city child, who preferred screaming fire engines and honking horns to the sounds of a babbling brook.
bureaucracy
/byʊˈrɒkrəsi/
n. a system of government administration consisting of numerous bureaus or offices, esp. one run according to inflexible end inefficient rules; any large administrative system characterized by inefficiency, lots of rules and red tape
- The Department of Motor Vehicles is a bureaucracy. The forms you have to fill out all request unnecessary information. After you finally get everything all filled out and handed in, you don’t hear another word from the department for many months.
bureaucrat
/ˈbyʊərəˌkræt/
n. a person who works in a bureaucracy
