April 25th Flashcards
Turpitude
Profligate
Libertinism
Spendthrift
Licentiousness
Prodigal
Shamelessly immoral or extremely wasteful
Profligate, as a noun or as an adjective, implies recklessly wasting your money on extravagant luxury. Profligate behavior is a lot of fun, but you’ll regret it later — when you get your charge card bill.
Vestigial
Oddment
Remnant
eg
a piece of cloth that is left over after the rest has been used or sold
Cosset
To treat as a pet, pamper.
To cosset is to pamper or spoil. Your mom might cosset her beloved lap dog, feeding him homemade meals and singing him to sleep.
Vicissitude
Changes or variations over time.
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. No one can escape the vicissitudes of life.
Gossamer
Diaphanous
Pellucid
Clear, sheer.
Solicitous
concerned or anxious
When you hear the word solicitous, think of your mom — attentive, caring, and concerned. It’s nice when your waiter gives you good service, but if he or she is solicitous, the hovering might annoy you.
Deferment
Abeyance
Quiescence
A state of temporary inactivity
A deferment delays something until a future time. If you want to wait a few years before paying off a loan, you need to ask for a deferment.
Immure
Inter
Inhume
To imprison
When you immure someone or something, you put it behind a wall, as in a jail or some other kind of confining space.
Tendentious
Strongly Biased.
If you are writing a report on climate change and you ignore evidence that the earth is warming, the paper might be called tendentious. Tendentious means promoting a specific, and controversial, point of view.
Inexorable
Unyielding
When a person is inexorable, they’re stubborn. When a thing or process is inexorable, it can’t be stopped.
Ennoble
Aggrandize
Augment
Exaggerate, make bigger.
Cadger
Mendicant
someone who mooches or cadges (tries to get something free)
People who live off begging can be called mendicants. However, you probably wouldn’t call your kids mendicants, even though they beg you for stuff, because the word mendicant also implies extreme poverty.
Yoke
Thrall
Burden, or something that oppresses
Ever seen a picture of a farm girl carrying two buckets of water hanging from ropes attached to a stick she’s balancing across her shoulders? That stick on her shoulders is a yoke.
Desultory
Lacking consistency or order
If you lack a definite plan or purpose and flit from one thing to another, your actions are desultory. Some people call such desultory wanderings spontaneous. Others call it “being lost.”
Canard
Rumour, baseless story.
During a political campaign, you will often hear on TV commercials some canard about the opponent. This is a false, deluding statement designed to confuse the voters, as it presents the other candidate in a bad light by spreading an untruth.
Toady
Myrmidon
Obsequious
Truckle
Subservient. Fawning
A myrmidon is someone who will do whatever you say. A schoolyard bully often has a myrmidon for a best friend — someone who is sure to never point out that it’s wrong to hassle other kids.
Rend
Rive
Tear violently
Fatuous
Inanely foolish
Abash
Discomfit
To put into a state of perplexity and embarrassment
Although abash sounds like a big party or what firefighters do to get through a locked door, abash is, in fact, a verb that means you have caused another person to feel awkward, bashful, embarrassed, or ashamed.
Proscribe
Interdict
Forbid
Interdict means to forbid, to nix, to veto. If your parents find out you’re planning a party for a time when they’re away , they will interdict it.
Ersatz
Apocryphal
Spurious
Questionable authenticity. False.
Flagrant
Egregious
Noticeably offensive
Something that is egregious stands out, but not in a good way — it means “really bad or offensive.” If you make an egregious error during a championship soccer match, your coach might bench you for the rest of the game.
Rarefy
Emaciate
Attenuate
Weaken. To thin out.
Someone who is dangerously skinny and skeletal-looking can be described as emaciated. It’s probably how you’d start to look after a few weeks in the wilderness with only berries and bugs for dinner.
Abscission
Ablation
The process of cutting off.
An ablation is removing a body part, organ, or tissue surgically. If a doctor takes out one of your kidneys, that’s an ablation.
Abscission means the cutting off or removal of something, like an unsightly mole on the chin.
Acerbic
Acidulous
Acrid
Asperity
Sharp, Caustic.
Asperity is the harsh tone or behavior people exhibit when they’re angry, impatient, or just miserable. When your supervisor’s “Late again!” greeting causes your entire future to pass before your eyes, he is speaking with asperity.
