• touché | “...”, “touché!”
• précis | As fiction, Sophie's World deserves no better than a D+. But as a précis of great thought, Gaarder's tour de force rates a solid B.
| In the nickelodeon era, movies were closer to ten-minute précis of Classics Illustrated versions of literary works.
• élan
• lycée | [Jean Victor] Poncelet was born at Metz in 1788, attended the lycée there, and then from 1807 to 1810, enrolled at the école Polytechnique, where he studied under Monge.
• passé | that's passé
• démodé | Affirmative action is démodé these days...
• nom de plume | Pascal [Blaise] sometimes wrote under the nom de plume of Lovis de Montalte, or its anagram, Amos Dettonville.
• bonhomie
• oeuvre
• savoir-faire | tact, address, diplomacy
• caveat emptor
• annus mirabilis | It was an annus mirabilis, a year of marvels. For no particular reason, 1993 was the best year since the 1970s for new motion pictures.
• quid pro quo | (from movie Silence of the Lamb.)
• hoi polloi | This modern contempt for the “general audience” [books] is quite beyond me. If you have no use for the hoi polloi (or their artifacts), just read journals. —Mark Warrian.
• lingua franca | Soccer, the lingua franca of sports everyweher else in the world, was finally on tongues in the U.S. as the cup made it's stateside debut.
• protégé | As a protégé of Sony founder Akio Morita, he ..
• voilà
• ménage à trois | ...Nina Hartley (she lives in a ménage à trois) with a guy and another woman and refers to her more plebeian self as Monica)...
• joie de vivre | you kind of lose whatever joie de vivre you were suppose to be getting from your runner's high.
• modus operandi
• beau monde | he considered her empty and much too beau monde.
• attaché
• non grata | (not welcome)
| ...spend the '70s and '80s as Broadway's pre-eminent personna non grata.
• sine qua non | The TeX typesetting lanugage...to be the sine qua non of technical typesetting, is...
• blasé | The drinkers seems more blasé than ever about the consequences.
• mélange | ...error filled mélange of pseudoscience.
• soufflés
• faux | faux pearls
• faux pas
• en masse
• tour de force
• per se
• de facto
• ad hoc
• post hoc (ergo propto hoc)
• ad hominem | Debaters should avoid ad hominem arguments that question their opponents' motives.
• ad populum
• bona fide
• pro forma | “in my family, the act of gifts giving on Christmas is considered as perfunctory and thus very much looked down.”
• sotto voce
• flagrante delicto
• alma mater | “alma mater of Harvard University”
• coup de grâce
• homo sapiens
• terra firma | solid ground.
• in toto | recommendations that were adopted in toto.
• in situ
• à la | a poem à la Ogden Nash.
• mea culpa
• sui generis | She wasn't a kind, she was sui generis.
• raison d'être |
• ne plus ultra | the studies [Liszt's Trancendental Etudes] are the ne plus ultra of romantic rhetoric and grandiloquence.
• esprit de corps | I found the esprit de corps of the class a lot more motivating than hunching over a website by myself. [about joining a memery improving class than reading such website.]
Page Created:1995. © 1995-2005 by Xah Lee.