8th August Flashcards
penurious
A lovely long way of saying you’re flat broke.
If someone accuses you of being cheap, tell them you prefer to be thought of as penurious.
Lacking money, poor
Warren Buffet, famous multi billionaire, still drives a cheap sedan not because he is penurious, but luxury cars are gaudy and impractical.
prosaic
Prosaic means ordinary or dull. Most of us lead a prosaic everyday life, sometimes interrupted by some drama or crisis.
Dull or lacking imagination
For news editors, a story about a person rejecting vaccination because of their beliefs is probably more interesting than reporting a more prosaic lack of transport or inconvenient clinic hours.
precipitate
When used as an adjective, precipitate means “hasty” or “acting suddenly.”
To cause to happen
Instead of conducting thorough investigation after the city hall break-in, the governor acted precipitately, accusing his staff of aiding and abetting the criminals.
In announcing the probe Tuesday, the Pentagon inspector general’s office did not disclose what precipitated it, but questions about security procedures arose in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol.
turpitude
If you are guilty of turpitude, you should be ashamed of yourself. Turpitude is a word that represents depraved behavior. Prisons are filled with criminals who have engaged in acts of moral turpitude.
arrant
The word arrant intensifies. An arrant criminal is one heck of a criminal. Arrant nonsense is total nonsense.
It can be used to add emphasis to other words, most often negative words.
Arrant rudeness is extreme rudeness.
Arrant hypocrisy is very hypocritical.
zeitgeist
Zeitgeist is the spirit or essence of a particular time.
base
the lowest, without any moral principles.
She was not so base as to begrudge the beggar the unwanted scrums from the dinner plate.
anathema
Something that one absolutely and positively cannot stand is anathema.
The source of somebody’s hate.
Some also split with moderate allies over issues such as Hong Kong independence as the idea, anathema to many older activists, gained favor with younger Hong Kongers.
vicissitude
When you talk of the vicissitudes of life, you’re referring to the difficult times that we all go through: sickness, job loss, and other unwelcome episodes.
While vicissitude comes from the Latin vicis, which means “change” and technically can mean a change of any kind, you’ll find that vicissitude is almost always used to talk about an unfortunate event or circumstance.
expunge
To expunge is to cross out or eliminate.
Expunge is often something you do to a document.
When government censors block out text in documents before making them public, they are expunging the text.
In 2018, the public defender’s office flagged to the monitoring team and Justice Department concerns over how some internal cases were wrongly being expunged.
attenuate
Attenuate is a verb that means to make or become weaker.
The effects of aging may be attenuated by exercise — or by drinking from the fountain of youth
