Vocab 4/14/14 Flashcards
Bosky
1. Covered with bushes, shrubs, small trees; woody
- Those who shiver in the cold of the bosky Pyrenees and among the white snowflakes of the lofty Apennines.
- In Bosky Brooklyn, Cows and Horses Come Out After Dark
- The result is “Sandy Remix,”a big, bosky structure by Roderick Wolgamott Romero that seems to evoke an osprey’s nest more than a treehouse.
2. Shady
-The 17th-century building on Skeppsholmen Island, a bosky enclave near the Moderna Museet, has original casement windows and wooden floors along with contemporary Swedish design furniture and lighting.
**B) **Somewhat the worse for drink; tipsy.
Salutiferous/Salutary
1. Salutary: promoting or conducive to health.
- “Get up, Sancho, if you can, and summon the governor of this castle, and have some oil, wine, salt and Rosemary brought to me so that I can make the salutiferous balsam.”
- His return has a salutary effect on both Ms. Bening’s character and the movie.
2. Conducive to saftey, well-being, salvation.
- But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the McCutcheon decision will have salutary effects. At its core, McCutcheon allows the rich (and only the rich) to buy more political influence, in a wider range of ways. This can only tip the playing field further away from the other 99 percent of the electorate.
- Over the last century, there have been four major, salutary scares, each of which has pushed Europe closer together.
Peerless
The Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia open in about two weeks with peerless sports pageantry and a cavalcade of athletic accomplishment that will captivate the world.1. Having no match; unequaled; unrivaled; without peer.
- He said he would try to emulate Mariano Rivera, the peerless closer for the Yankees.
- As the show’s peerless overture was being played, by eight musicians, I thought I was going to miss having a full orchestra.
- The Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia open in about two weeks with peerless sports pageantry and a cavalcade of athletic accomplishment that will captivate the world.
Tortuous
Certainly a timely gift can lubricate the tortuous path to the Oscars — a thought that may well have occurred to one high-powered stylist who recently asked Ms. Neuwirth outright for a pricey pendant as compensation for her services. 1. full of twists, turns, or bends; twisting, winding, or crooked: a tortuous path.
- Although it was made up of his mules’ body pads and blankets, it was far superior to Don Quixote’s, which consisted of four bumpy boards on top of two tortuous benches, a mattress so thin that it was more like a bedspread…
- “Success or failure depends on so little in this game,” said Wenger immediately after Saturday’s tortuous win over Wigan.
- Certainly a timely gift can lubricate the tortuous path to the Oscars — a thought that may well have occurred to one high-powered stylist who recently asked Ms. Neuwirth outright for a pricey pendant as compensation for her services.
- Many of the places where the Ancestral Puebloans once flourished are not only uninhabited today; they are so remote that it can take several days of backpacking through trail-less, tortuous canyons to reach them.
2. not direct or straightforward, as in procedure or speech; intricate; circuitous: tortuous negotiations lasting for months.
3.deceitfully indirect or morally crooked, as proceedings,methods, or policy; devious
Ad Infinitum
1. to infinity; endlessly; without limit.
- As for the nuclear whistle-blower who assists her, we first saw him, decades before, in bed with the young musician. And so on, ad infinitum —or ad nauseam,if, like the publisher, you have no taste for “tricksygimmicks.”
- The risk for Facebook and Bitcoin, respectively, is that someone creates a better social network or decentralized digital currency. History suggests both will happen – innovators almost never retain their dominant positions ad infinitum.
- Also, fluctuations in the casino business aside, the supplements would continue indefinitely. That “ad infinitum” quality may both change how the money is spent and also protect against the corrosive psychological effects of chronic uncertainty.
Brackish
1) Slightly Salty; having a salty or briny flavor.
-But dozens of dams and hydroelectric plants built on the two rivers in Turkey and Syria in the 1980’s and 1990’s drastically reduced the flow of water downstream and accelerated a long trend toward brackish, unhealthy water because of agricultural runoff and other pollution
2) Distasteful; unpleasant; naseous.
- The rain left behind a brackish well, tucked into a fold of the landscape, that Mr. Shafiq used to tend to a vegetable garden.
- They were brackish from a malfunctioning pipe between the bay and the ponds.
3) Nautical
-The pithy conciseness of the brackish tongue renders it eminently useful on duty.
Deciduous
** a. Bot. and Zool. Of parts of plants or animals (as leaves, petals, teeth, horns, etc.): Falling off or shed at a particular time, season, or stage of growth. Opposed to persistent or permanent.**
Humans are not unique in shedding and replacing their milk teeth, or deciduous teeth, and other primates do so for the same reason: They have different teeth for different diets at different stages of life.
** b. Bot. Of a tree or shrub: That sheds its leaves every year; opposed to evergreen.**
The two types co-exist, but the sunnier colors only become visible when the chlorophylls break down at the end of the growing season, when deciduous trees reallocate resources from leaves to roots.
** 3. fig. Fleeting, transitory; perishing or disappearing after having served its purpose.**
Ecumenical
Belonging to or representing the whole (Christian) world, or the universal church; general, universal, catholic; spec. applied to the general councils of the early church, and (in mod. use) of the Roman Catholic Church (and hence occas. to a general assembly of some other ecclesiastical body); also assumed as a title by the Patriarch of Constantinople; formerly sometimes applied to the Pope of Rome.
2. gen. Belonging to the whole world; universal, general, world-wide.
-This ecumenical format, known as group journalism, was created by Harry Luce, whose most formative years were spent in the China Inland Mission School in Chefoo. Today, his creation would be called cloud journalism.
Scud
a. intr. To run or move briskly or hurriedly; to dart nimbly from place to place.
2. To sail or move swiftly on the water. Now chiefly (and in technical nautical use exclusively), to run before a gale with little or no sail.
3. Of clouds, foam, etc.: To be driven by the wind.
- Fog scudded in, thicker and thicker.
- Georgia O’Keeffe clouds scud across the sky.
4. trans. To pass, travel, or sail quickly over. (scud missile)
5. dial. a. To throw (a flat stone) so as to make it skim the surface of a body of water.
ALSO NOUN.
Conclave
1. a private or secret meeting.
- Typical was one post on Nov. 15, made at the conclusion of a Communist Partyconclave in Beijing focused on economic policies
- Among the federal officials who gathered here this week for a conclave on border security, there was little talk of building a fence along the 2,000-mile Mexican border.
2. an assembly or gathering, especially one that has special authority, power, or influence: a conclave of political leaders.
-In 1995, in Chicago, Besoz manned an Amazon booth at the annual conclave of the publishing industry, which is now called BookExpo America.
3. the assembly or meeting of the cardinals for the election of apope.
4. the body of cardinals; the College of Cardinals.
Seedy 6/2/14
1. Abounding in seed/full of seed.
2 a. Shabby, ill-looking.
- Twitter Helps Revive a Seedy San Francisco Neighborhood.
- Behind the Facades, a Seedy Past Endures: New York’s oldest streetscape, once famed for its “bums,” has just been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
- A Motel Shakes Off Its Seedy Past
b. Unwell, poorly, ‘not up to the mark’, spec. as a result of excessive eating or drinking.
Priggish
3. Excessively precise in matters or learning, conduct, etc.; self-righteously correct; moralistic.
- It falls to the lot of the reader of fiction frequently to become acquainted with a hero who is a hopeless prig, and one now and then lapses by gradations of appreciation into considering self-sufficient priggishness as one of the cardinal virtues.
- Malvolio is “Twelfth Night’s” ever-priggish malcontent, the steward of the lovesick Countess Olivia and a posturer doomed by play’s end to call for revenge even as the celebrants in his midst make hay, none too mindful of the rage that has been permitted to fester on their watch.
Prig=Snob; prude
Corrade
2. To scrape, wear down by scraping.
-
Furore
1. Enthusiastic popular admiration; a ‘rage’, ‘craze’.
- French President Francois Hollande sets out his plans to revive the weak French economy as the media furore over his alleged a secret love affair with an actress continues.
- A furore over the extent of computerized trading erupted this summer when news of the enormous profits being garnered rankled a public already apprehensive about a crisis rooted in Wall Street — whose bailout the taxpayer is footing.
2. Uproar, disturbance, fury.
- Your father laughed recalling fist-fights about such issues as the best goalie in the county… One thing he always made a point of was to stand a round of drinks after the furore had died down.
- Berkeley Police Chief at Center of Free Speech Furor
Debutant/Dilettante
A male performer or speaker making his first appearance before the public. Also, a young woman who has recently ‘come out.’
vs.
Dilettante
1. a. A lover of the fine arts; originally, one who cultivates them for the love of them rather than professionally, and so = amateur n. as opposed to professional; but in later use generally applied more or less depreciatively to one who interests himself in an art or science merely as a pastime and without serious aim or study (‘a mere dilettante’).
