#45 garrulous ~ guile Flashcards
garrulous
/ˈgærələs, ˈgæryə-/
adj. talkative; chatty
- Gabriella is gregarious and garrulous; she loves to hangout with the gang and gab.
gauche
/goʊʃ/
adj. unskillful; awkward; maladroit
These days, gauche tends to describe social, rather than physical, ineptness.
- Smadar had a poor sense of comic timing, and her gauche attempts to mock her left-handed friends soon left her with none.
genteel
/dʒɛnˈtil/
adj. refined, polite; aristocratic; affecting refinement
- The ladies at the ball were too genteel to accept our invitation to the wrestling match.
A person who is genteel has gentility.
gesticulate
/dʒɛˈstɪkyəˌleɪt/
v. to make gestures, esp. when speaking or in place of speaking
- Massimo gesticulated wildly on the other side of the theater in an attempt to get out attention.
- The after-dinner speaker gesticulated in such a strange way that the audience paid more attention to his hands than to his words.
A person who gesticulates makes gesticulations.
glut
/glʌt/
n. a surplus; an overabundance
- The international oil shortage turned into an international oil glut with surprising speed.
- We had a glut of contributions but a dearth, or scarcity, of volunteers; it seemed that people would rather give their money than their time.
grandiloquent
/grænˈdɪləkwənt/
adj. pompous; using a lot of big, fancy words in an attempt to sound impressive
- The governor’s speech was grandiloquent rather than eloquent; there were some six-dollar words and some impressive phrases, but he really had nothing to say.
- The new minister’s grandiloquence got him in trouble with deacons, who wanted him to be more restrained in his sermons.
grandiose
/ˈgrændiˌoʊs/
adj. absurdly exaggerated
- The scientist’s grandiose plan was to build a huge shopping center on the surface of the moon.
- Their house was genuinely impressive, although there were a few grandiose touches: a fireplace the size of a garage, a kitchen with four ovens, and a computerized media center in every room.
To be grandiose is to be characterized by grandiosity.
gratuitous
/grəˈtuɪtəs, -ˈtyu-/
adj. given freely (said of sth. bad); unjustified; unprovoked; uncalled for
- The scathing review of the movie contained several gratuitous remarks about the sex life of the director.
- Their attack against us was gratuitous; we had never done anything to offend them.
gratuity
/grəˈtuɪti, -ˈtyu-/
n. a tip, like the one you leave in a restaurant
A gratuity is a nice thing. Gratuitous, however, is not nice.
gravity
/ˈgrævɪti/
n. seriousness
- The anchorman’s nervous giggling was entirely inappropriate, given the gravity of the situation.
- No one realizes the gravity of Myron’s drug addiction until it was much too late to help him.
Gravity is the force that makes apples fall down instead of up, and the word also carries a different sort of weightiness.
At the heart of the word gravity is the word grave, which means serious.
gregarious
/grɪˈgɛəriəs/
adj. sociable; enjoying the company of others
- Dirk was too gregarious to enjoy the fifteen years he spent in solitary confinement.
- Kyle wasn’t very gregarious; she went to the party, but she spent most of her time hiding in a closet.
In biology, gregarious is used to describe animals that live in groups. Bees, which live together in large colonies, are said to be gregarious.
guile
n. cunning; duplicity; artfulness
- José used guile, not intelligence, to win the spelling bee; he cheated.
- Stuart was shocked by the guile of the automobile mechanic, who had poked a hole in his radiator and then told him that it has sprung a leak.
guileless
adj. innocent; naive
Guileless and artless are synonyms.
beguile
v. to deceive, but in a charming and not always bad way
- Clarence found Mary’s beauty so beguiling that he did anything she asked of him.
