Words 8/12/13 Flashcards
Punctilious
M: Punkt-cavil about punctilious people in Golden Gate.
Extremely attentive to punctilious (fine point or detail as in ceremony, conduct, or procedure);
strict or exact in the formalities of conduct or action.
S: It’s the perfect retail idea for a city whose inhabitants are famous for their punctilious accessorizing and propensity to turn one-room bars into idiosyncratic mini-theater.
S: Mr. Marías, 63, taught translation theory at Oxford and speaks in an amusingly punctilious English that is dotted with fusty Britishisms. He refers to his cleaning lady as a “charwoman” and says things like “Oh dear” if there’s an unexpected knock on the door.
Broad
a woman; promiscuous woman
Vaporous
M: Think vapors of fabric.
1) Having characteristics of vapor
2) dimmed or obscured with vapor
3) unsubstantial; diaphanous; airy: vaporous fabrics, breezes.
S: But, according to forensic linguists, meaning is far more vaporous…
S: Ready-to-wear hardly encompasses the full Outerknown brief, although the vaporous rubric of “lifestyle brand” is not much better.
Gestalt
M: Don’t guess-tall think about everything.
a unified whole: can’t be broken into summation of parts.
S: And context is crucial; when we try to record a conversation, we are capturing only part of the gestalt of that moment
S: Run cooperatively, the organization has core principles particularly well suited to the gestalt of 21st-century Brooklyn parenting, which sustains a bias, not always believably sincere, against fierce striving and competition.
Shibboleth
M: Leth Shib come in.
1) A peculiar pronunciation, behavior, mode of dress that distinguishes a particular class or set of persons.
2) a slogan, catchword
3) a common saying or belief with little current meaning or truth.
S: The revolution never sought to dispel the shibboleth that Egypt’s army was sacred.
S: The budget also offers virtually no significant increase in public school funding while increasing voucher support for private and religious schools at taxpayers’ expense. It includes another shibboleth of the hard-right agenda — a requirement for drug testing of those seeking a variety of public benefits.
Apercus
M: Aperture–view
1) a hasty glance; a glimpse
2) an immediate estimate or judgment; understanding, insight
3) an outline or summary
S: Arango, a German television writer, has constructed a clever plot that always surprises, told with dark humor and dry wit and bustling with aperçus that show no signs of jet lag from Imogen Taylor’s clean translation.
S: Since much of Barney’s success as a saloniste depended on her quick-witted but necessarily evanescent aperçus, it is now hard to get a glimpse of her charm except in the mirror of lists like these.
Fetching
M: Dog playing chase is captivated.
Charming, captivating
S: His eyes were playful and his smile fetching.
Schema
an underlying organizational pattern or structure; conceptual framework, provides the basis by which someone relates to the events he/she experiences.
Semiotic
M: Signs and symbols of Mitosis and Miosis
1) of or relating to signs or symptoms.
2) Science of communication studied through the interpretation of signs and symbols as they operate in various fields, esp. language.
S: But about a century ago, a field called ‘‘semiotics’’ developed which takes the study of signs and meaning as its focus. In more recent years, the field has grown and developed, spawning movements called ‘‘structuralism,’’ ‘‘post-structuralism,’’ ‘‘deconstructionism’’ and ‘‘inter-textuality.’’ Fashion and Debate.
S: And yet his argument about rubber bullets and their place in the semiotics of Israeli society is fascinating, as are many of the other arguments he makes in this book.
S: Books of The Times; Madonna Writes; Academics Explore Her Erotic Semiotics
S: The Obscure and Uncertain Semiotics of Fashion
Decry
M: De-valuing through Crying
1) to denounce, condemn, suppress, or depreciate by proclamation; bring down the value of by proclamation.
S: A prosecution memo at the time stated that there was no case against williams, but the judge, who, in his ruling, decried “the cynicism and hypocrisy of corrupt public officials,” set it aside.
S: Russian Protesters Decry War in Ukraine, Several Detained
Recant
M: RE-cant
1) a Trans. To withdraw, retract, renounce, or disavow (a former statement, opinion, belief, action, etc) as erroneous or heretical esp. formally or publicly.
b) intrans.
S: Violence Legal Empowerment and Appeals Project and a law professor at George Washington University, said abuse victims often recant “under pressure, threats or sweet-talking by their abuser.”
S: In a statement, Fatou Bensouda, the court prosecutor, said inquiries in Kenya had been “undermined by a relentless campaign that has targeted individuals who are perceived to be prosecution witnesses, with threats or offers of bribes, to dissuade them from testifying or persuade witnesses to recant their prior testimony.”
Reams
1) a large quantity: reams of poetry
Verb: to enlarge to desired size
2) to extract the juice from: To ream an orange
S: Maigret doesn’t divulge clues or examine ballistic reports or propound theories so much as roam like a licensed voyeur through the lives of everybody in the vicinity, checking out who’s sleeping with whom, who likes their job or drinks too much, who has money in their pocket and who doesn’t. Maigret, more than any other detective with a ream of adventures under his belt, rarely solves crimes; instead, he solves people.
S: In order to boost inflation – currently 0.4 percent – and weak growth, the ECB has introduced a ream of policy measures such as negative interest rates, bank loans and an asset purchase programme.
Bent
Meaning, Leonard noted, is constantly bent by expectation.
Purport
M: Cat purring with deceit re-PORT-ing
v: Profess or claim falsely: A documenting purporting to be official.
S: A series of videos that purport to show that Planned Parenthood improperly sells fetal tissue to researchers for profit has reignited anti-abortion voters’ fervor during a turbulent Republican presidential primary campaign.
S: Tenants are crammed into bedrooms, as many as eight to a room. The ramshackle homes are often infested with bedbugs and rodents. Bunk beds block exits. Because they are not regulated, they are often centers of the very kind of drug activity they purport to avoid.
