Week of 3rd Feb Flashcards
Recalcitrant
**1. Esp. of a person or animal: obstinately disobedient; uncooperative, refractory; objecting to constraint or restriction. Also with to. **Mulish
South Koreans Express Fatigue With a Recalcitrant North
Missouri has been especially recalcitrant in trying to block reform. It declined to create its own insurance exchange, as have many other states
But rather than continue to wrangle with recalcitrant Republicans, Mr. Obama has told associates that he sees more opportunities for progress in using his so-called convening power to summon to the White House and mobilize some of the nation’s most prominent citizens, who can have an immediate impact in their fields.
** 3. Bot. Of seeds: viable for only a short time; spec. unable to survive drying or freezing, making them difficult to preserve. Of a plant: having seeds of this kind.**
B. n. A recalcitrant person or thing; (with the and pl. concord) recalcitrant people as a class.
Various tactics ensured that recalcitrants fled—gunfire, stone throwing and the hurling of crude bombs.
THES: Headstrong; Intractable; Mulish; disobedient; refractory; obstinate
Perfidy
1) Deceitfulness, untrustworthiness; breach of faith or of a promise; betrayal of trust.
The relationship is so frayed, however, that Mr. Karzai often is quick to view everything through the prism of presumed American Perfidy.
‘Betrayal’ Harold Pinter’s great drama of love and perfidy among the literati has been transformed into a boisterous comedy of infidelity
This cycle illustrated both the limits and the perfidy of money. The sums spent by Crossroads and other groups on negative ads against Sherrod Brown in Ohio, an eminently beatable Democrat running for re-election to the Senate, didn’t infuse his challenger, Josh Mandel, 35, with the maturity and eloquence he badly needed.
2) A perfidious act.
When an Atlantic City hooker stole his $8,000 watch, he bellowed outrage at such perfidy and called the cops.
Apotheosis
1. the elevation or exaltation of a person, etc to the rank of a god.
But in the 1980s, a movement to interpret the amendment as promoting the right to bear arms for self-defense emerged. It reached an apotheosis of sorts in the 2008 case, which struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns. It was the first time the court had ever restricted gun regulation, but the 5-to-4 vote also suggests that the decision is not fixed doctrine.
2. the ideal example; epitome; quintessence: This poem is the apotheosis of lyric expression.
- It was a performance, like the two in “Norma,” that was the apotheosis of the 30-something, with both the freshness of youth and the depth of age.
- For this master collaborator, the power lies partly in artists recognizing art, which is perhaps why “Love Focused Like a Laser” felt neither conceptual nor cool, but more like an apotheosis of earnest community theater.
- From another, it comes off as the apotheosis of the excesses it so spectacularly displays.
Rangy
** a. Of an animal: adapted for or capable of ranging; having long limbs and a lean body.**
- He fits the more conventional quarterback profile — a rangy 6-foot-6 — and may have a future.
- In photographs from his younger days, Holley is rangy and handsome, with an intense, faraway gaze that, in certain shots, possesses a dangerous, slightly mad edge.
** c. Of a plant or tree: tall and spindly with long branches, or a long stem or trunk; (of a branch, etc.) long and thin.**
** 2. orig. and chiefly Austral. Mountainous, hilly.**
** 3. Chiefly N. Amer. Of a place: having room for ranging; spacious.**
A rich chocolate-tone timber-veneer trim is offset by crisp white walls and the glass surrounds of the rangy living area.
4. Of great scope or compass; expansive, broad, wide-ranging.
- This rangy and precise book deserves to be read even by those historians who think they are bored with Descartes.
- and that evidence of this can be found in the decades of work that followed: the self-portrait of a rangy Balthus
- His sixth Russell opus shows signs of cloak-and-dagger fatigue (even readers new to the genre know not to take suicides and suspicious bombings at face value), but one can only marvel at his talent for infusing such a rangy cast of characters with nuance and soul.
- As Mr. Henry’s sizable frame lowers in self-reproach, Troy’s rangy geniality shifts within seconds to a savage fury.
Slag
** 1. A piece of refuse matter (see 2) separated from a metal in the process of smelting.**
The idea for a links course in oft-forgotten Inverness goes back decades. Town leaders looked at the pile of slag left behind when the last of the coal mines shuttered in the late 1960s and organized a committee to devise uses for the land that sits between the town and the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
a. a worthless or insignificant person (freq. used as a term of contempt): Contemptible, petty criminal, vagrant, promiscuous,
He throws a spotlight on every star performer from Vreeland and Mr. Adrover and the supermodel Kate Moss (who shares the author’s humble British roots, and whom he once unintentionally insulted by affectionately calling her a “working-class slag from a crap town, just like me” — buzzmakers left out the “just like me”)
b. Worthless matter; rubbish; nonsense.
**1. trans. To free (ore) from slag; to convert into slag; to scorify. **
3. trans. To abuse or denigrate (a person); to criticize, insult. Also with off. slang.
Then he slagged his own people and called them names. Then he wallowed in self-pity for the way they had betrayed him. That’s pitiful, not entertaining.
As a lurker, moreover, I’ve sinned. I’ve sat idly by while regular posters slagged off shows or people I like. I’ve encountered perilous misinformation I could have corrected, complaints by sufferers I could have reassured and threats by bullies I could have censured — and all the while I’ve said nothing.
Thes: Castigate, denigrate, decry, censure
Besot
1. to intoxicate or stupefy with drink.
2. to make stupid or foolish: The stories had besotted her mind with fear and superstition.
-Mr. Kaplan’s challenge is to besot his young publisher with a love of the ink-and-newsprint business before that happens.
3. to infatuate; obsess: Youth and beauty have a tendency to besot middle-aged men; charm and tenderness does it for women of all ages.
-During what becomes a three-day idyll as the besotted lovers hatch a plan to flee to Canada, Frank becomes a surrogate father to Henry, teaching him to play baseball and do other manly things that his real dad, Gerald (Clark Gregg), never bothered to show him.
adj:
- he yowled incessantly, he would eat only boiled cod, and he was evidently used to receiving the undivided attention of his besotted owner
- Consider yourself an arts-besotted belle epoque figure awash in leisure time.
- But in whatever language, the image of a girl throwing a flower in the air as a besotted boy looked on, the feeling of budding but frustrated desire, stayed with me and became one of the themes of my fiction.
Discursive
- Passing aimlessly from one subject to another; digressive; rambling
Sent 1) Berssenbrugge’s 12th collection raises mere expression to the level of vital hymn, as her discursive poems tackle topics like time, the environment, perception and beingness.
2) Mr. Liu repeatedly indulged in discursive attacks on the city’s Campaign Finance Board for refusing to provide him with matching funds for his candidacy.
3) Twitter was the last, and maybe the least, of the discursive forms Mr. Ebert mastered.
Heuristic
** a. Serving to find out or discover**
For Mr. Yerushalmi, the statutes themselves are a secondary concern. “If this thing passed in every state without any friction, it would have not served its purpose,” he said in one of several extensive interviews. “The purpose was heuristic — to get people asking this question, ‘What is Shariah?’
b. A heuristic process or method for attempting the solution of a problem; a rule or item of information used in such a process.
- In a recent series of studies that we will present in a forthcoming issue of the journal Political Psychology, we have shown that people apply what we call a “secrecy heuristic” — a rule of thumb, in other words — when evaluating the quality of information related to national security. People rate otherwise identical pieces of information as more accurate, reliable and of higher quality when they are labeled secret rather than public.
- My research indicates that gut feelings are based on simple rules of thumb, what we psychologists term “heuristics.”
- Because intuition often underlies stock picking. Ordinary investors will frequently pick a company they’ve heard of before. We call this the “recognition heuristic,” and it basically means “go with what you know.”
- When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds.
- What has gone wrong here? An easy question (how coherent is the narrative?) is substituted for a more difficult one (how probable is it?). And this, according to Kahneman, is the source of many of the biases that infect our thinking. System 1 jumps to an intuitive conclusion based on a “heuristic” — an easy but imperfect way of answering hard questions — and System 2 lazily endorses this heuristic answer without bothering to scrutinize whether it is logical.
bona fide (adj)
1) Real or Genuine
- Now, 10 years after its release, “The Room” has acheived bona fide cult success, turning its misguided auteur into the unlikeliest of stars.
- Malinee Chakrabandhu is a bona fide member of the Thai aristocracy. She is also a self-described “black sheep” of her family
- Since then, a bona fide Chinatown has unexpectedly bloomed in the desert, with the area’s fast-growing community turning Spring Mountain Road into a busy three-mile stretch of Asian businesses.
2) Law: made or done in an honest or sincere way
a bona fide statement of intent to sell.
Cosset
MNEU: There was no cause to cosset.
verb (used with object)
1. to treat as a pet; pamper; coddle.
- A glum nightclub singer – Ingrid Caven, who’s tricked out like a caricature of Dietrich – is ailing with some nameless rot. She permits a wealthy young admirer (Peter Kern) to cosset her, cure her and finally marry her.
- But he says he is trying to hold on to what he considers the source of his inspiration as an actor – his identification with other people living their everyday lives – in the face of a celebrity machine that serves to insulate, isolate and cosset stars.
- A Well-Aged White Wine to Cosset Miso-Glazed Fish
- At departure, an airport is supposed to lure you in and cosset you into the wonders of travel; at the end of the flight, the arrival airport is supposed to welcome you to the new place and hint at its attractions.
- When I lurk, I relax, fall silent, become a cosseted 19th-century baroness whose electronic servants bring her funny pictures and distracting tales.
- *noun
2. a lamb brought up without its dam; pet lamb.
3. any pet.**
Thes: Dandle
