April 24 Flashcards
Arrogate
To claim or seize without justification
To arrogate is to take over. When the teacher steps out of the classroom and some bossy student marches up to the chalkboard and begins scolding the other kids? The student is trying to arrogate the teacher’s authority.
Orotund
Bombastic
Turgid
Tumid
Tumescent
Swollen in speech.
Orotund - full and rich in voice
Solecism
Malapropism
Minor blunder in speech or etiquette.
Ever snore at the opera? Burp at the dinner table? Forget your mom’s birthday? Probably all three, right? Well, don’t worry. Instead of just screwing up, what you did was commit a solecism. Sounds kinda neat that way, huh?
Ponderous
Weighed down
When you call Frankenstein ponderous, it’s not because he likes to ponder the great questions of life. It’s because he moves like a Mack truck, only slower and less gracefully.
Dithyramb
Panegyric
Encomium
Lofty praise.
Lachrymose
Weepy, Melancholic
A good place to see a display of lachrymose sorrow is at a funeral — people sobbing openly or sniffling quietly into their hankies. To be lachrymose, in other words, is to be tearful.
Prolixity
Voluble
Garrulous
Loquacious
wordy, verbose
If someone likes to talk but they’re really boring, they’ve got prolixity. It’s not something to be proud of.
Stratagem
Military manoeuvre to deceive. Crafty scheme
A stratagem is a scheme or a clever plot. You can have a stratagem for winning a chess game, getting the girl (or boy), and avoiding a punishment. However, your opponents, crushes, and parents may have a trick or two of their own.
Fomenter
Incendiary
Demagogue
Setting on fire, arousing strife
A demagogue is someone who becomes a leader largely because of skills as a speaker or who appeals to emotions and prejudices.
Apophthegm
Dictum
Proverb
Formal or authoritative pronouncement.
Tractable
Biddable
Easily controlled, docile.
Sinecure
A job or position that pays well while requiring little work.
Equivocate
Palter
Mendacious
Prevaricate
Unclear language to deceive.
To palter is to beat around the bush by speaking or writing in an unclear way. People palter to confuse others.
Lassitude
Languid
Torpor
Flag
Lackadaisical
Indolent
Drooping from exhaustion, lacking in spirit.
Credulous
Naive
People who believe things easily without having to be convinced are credulous. Sales people are always hoping that someone credulous picks up the phone during a sales call.
Credulous comes from the 16th-century Latin credulus, or “easily believes.” A synonym for credulous is gullible, and both terms describe a person who accepts something willingly without a lot of supporting facts. Calling someone credulous can imply that the person is naive and simple. An individual isn’t necessarily insulted by being called credulous, though, because some objects of belief, like religions and unicorns, come with a willing leap of faith for believing in what is unseen.
Polemic
Eristic
A polemic is something that stirs up controversy by having a negative opinion, usually aimed at a particular group. A piece of writing can be a polemic, as long as it gets someone’s goat.
If you love to argue, you’re eristic. Being eristic is a fairly common quality for a debater to have.
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Parry
Deflect or avoid
Cupidity
Avarice
Rapacity
Excessive greed.
Remember the saying “Greed is good”? It could just as easily be “Cupidity is good,” though admittedly it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite the same way. Cupidity means a burning desire to have more wealth than you need.
Dilatory
Tardy, procrastination
Something dilatory creates a delay. If you are a high school student, once in a while you might have used dilatory tactics if you forgot to do your homework.
Dudgeon
Umbrage
To take offence or annoyance
When someone takes umbrage at something, they find it offensive, and it probably makes them angry.
Bowdlerize
Expurgate
Red-pencil
Censure. Remove objectionable or offensive parts.
To expurgate is to censor. Usually, people talk about expurgating bad words from something written or on TV.
Irreverant
Impious
Lacking respect or reverence
To be impious is to be disrespectful of god or duty. When someone is being impious they are doing things that their church, synagogue, temple, mosque, school principal, government or parents would find unacceptable.
Contemporaries
a person or thing living or existing at the same time as another.
Recondite
Little known, abstruse.
It’s rather difficult to penetrate the meaning of recondite. Fitting, because it’s an adjective that basically means hard for the average mind to understand.
Several
some, not many.
Excising
charge excise on
An excise tax is a special tax levied on specific products sold within a country. To excise something can also mean to get rid of it. Say, wouldn’t it be nice if they would excise the excise taxes?
Fecklessness
If a newspaper editorial describes a politician as feckless, you might wonder, “What is feck, and why doesn’t he have any?” In fact, the columnist is accusing the politician of being irresponsible and incompetent.
irresponsible, lacking initiative or strength
Indictment
A formal charge or accusation of a serious crime
impecunious
Having little or no money
If you are hard up, broke, penniless, or strapped for cash, you could describe yourself as impecunious. Then maybe you could make some money teaching vocabulary words.
Hortatory
trying to strongly encourage or persuade someone to do something
Hortatory is a word used to describe a behavior or action that is encouraging. In the face of great economic crisis, the president’s speech takes on a hortatory or encouraging tone, at a time when people most need the reassurance.
Extant
Still in existence, surviving
Use the adjective extant to describe old things that are still around, like your extant diary from third grade or the only extant piece of pottery from certain craftspeople who lived hundreds of years ago.
Trifling
Trivial
If something is trifling it’s really unimportant, of no consequence — “a trifling detail.”
Promulgated
To promote or make widely known
Promulgated means “published,” or “formally and publicly declared.” Newspaper opinion pieces contain promulgated ideas and viewpoints.
Insipid
Lacking flavour, weak or tasteless. Bland.
Something insipid is lacking in flavor or interest. You’ll probably find the generic poems inside of greeting cards insipid.
Heterodox
Not confirming to accepted orthodox.
Ameliorate
Make something better
Outmoded
Old-fashioned
Tillage
Preparation of land for growing crops
Harbinger
A person or thing that announces the arrival of another
Panacea
A solution or remedy for all difficulties or diseases
Adroit
Clever or skillful
Bucolic
Pastoral
Spurious
False or Fake. Related to Specious (misleading in appearance)
Hidebound
Hidebound things — or people — are stuck in the past, unable to change. Your boss’s hidebound attitudes about gender make him reluctant to hire women for most jobs.
Unwilling or unable to change because of convention
Circumlocution
Circumlocution is a long, complicated word which means a long, complicated way of expressing something. To cut to the chase, circumlocution means to beat around the bush.
Expropriate
Use the verb expropriate to describe the act of taking people’s property, usually by a government. If you really like your neighbor’s house, you may wish you could expropriate the property.
Dissemble
To dissemble is to hide under a false appearance, to deceive. “When confronted about their human rights record, the Chinese government typically dissembles.”
