Princeton Vocab II (C)

Question 1

Captious

Answer 1

adj.
Overly critical, calculated to confuse/entrap/entangle in an argument

He was a captious and cranky eater who never met a vegetable he didn’t hate.

late Middle English (also in the sense ‘intended to deceive someone’): from Old French captieux or Latin captiosus, from captio(n- ) ‘seizing’, (figuratively) ‘deceiving’

Question 2

Contumely

Answer 2

noun.
Insolent or insulting language or treatment.

He was “prone to regard almost everybody with suspicion and ready to castigate his critics with contumely rather than facts”.

late Middle English: from Old French contumelie, from Latin contumelia, perhaps from con- ‘with’ + tumere ‘to swell’

Question 3

Desuetude

Answer 3

noun.
A state of disuse

Tumblr sowed the seeds of its desuetude even before its 2018 NSFW ban, Valens argues.

early 17th century (in the sense ‘cessation’): from French, from Latin desuetudo, from desuet- ‘made unaccustomed’, from the verb desuescere, from de- (expressing reversal) + suescere ‘be accustomed’.

Question 4

Encomium

Answer 4

noun.
A speech or piece of writing that constitutes high praise.

The encomiums his cheerleaders offer him, a veteran professional politician in a baggy suit, are as extreme as his ideas.

mid 16th century: Latin, from Greek enkōmion ‘eulogy’, from en- ‘within’ + komos ‘revel’.

Question 5

Upbraid

Answer 5

verb
Find fault with, scold

The National Covid Memorial Wall is an attempt both to remember the dead and to upbraid the living.

late Old English upbrēdan ‘allege (something) as a basis for censure’, based on braid in the obsolete sense ‘brandish’. The current sense dates from Middle English

Question 6

Mendicant

Answer 6

adj, noun.
(something related to) a beggar, a monk of an order that traditionally relies on alms.

Francis is the first pope to name himself after the mendicant friar, who renounced a wealthy, dissolute lifestyle to embrace a life of poverty and service to the poor.

late Middle English: from Latin mendicant- ‘begging’, from the verb mendicare, from mendicus ‘beggar’, from mendum ‘fault’

Question 7

Meretricious

Answer 7

adj.
Apparently attractive but having no real value, (archaic) related to a prostitute.

The real problem is a green unwillingness to forgo shiny, meretricious plaudits for fake gestures in place of patiently laying the groundwork for something that might actually have some value.

early 17th century: from Latin meretricius (adjective from meretrix, meretric- ‘prostitute’, from mereri ‘be hired’)

Question 8

Peroration

Answer 8

noun.
The conclusion of a speech (or a highly rhetorical speech in general)

Pastor Goff, after joking that all the famous visitors had eaten up his preaching time, brought the theme into his peroration.

early 17th century: from Latin perorat- ‘spoken at length’, from the verb perorare, from per- ‘through’ + orare ‘speak’

Question 9

Saturnine

Answer 9

adj.
Gloomy, dark and mysterious, sardonic, (archaic) related to lead.

Whatever might come, this would not be a tenure of earth tones and lethargy and saturnine expressions.

late Middle English (as a term in astrology): from Old French saturnin, from medieval Latin Saturninus ‘of Saturn’ (identified with lead by the alchemists and associated with slowness and gloom by astrologers)

Question 10

Sententious

Answer 10

adj.
Terse, aphoristic, or moralistic in expression

These are the sententious keynote presentations, used to dazzle investors or recruit employees, that try to get a startup to seem like a holy mission.

late Middle English: from Latin sententiosus, from sententia ‘opinion’. The original sense was ‘full of meaning or wisdom’, later becoming depreciatory.

Question 11

Stentorian

Answer 11

adj.
(Of a voice) loud and powerful.

The Washington Post says his stentorian delivery earned him the nickname “Boomer.”

c. 1600, from Stentor, legendary Greek herald in the Trojan War, whose voice (described in the “Iliad”) was as loud as 50 men.