• compunction | compunction follows my concscience like a remora. —Xah Lee
• snub | Universities Snub Napster Ban Request
• impound
• amity | The comforting ethos of the series [Star Trek] was expressed not merely in the amity of the crew... [Time Mag?]
• nettlesome | ...[some companies] are teaming up with local partners to build plants in China and circumvent the country's nettlesome trade barriers.
• edict | One edict for Star Trek [script]: The crew of the Enterprise always gets along.
• jeremiad | tirade, diatribes, fulmination, harangue, obloquy, philippic. jeremiad stands out among thee, because it pocesses beauty.
• cognate | Once upon a time, riddles were respectable. Their antiquity and function can be guessed at from the word's origin in the Old English raedan, ‘a story or interpretation’, which is cognate with words meaning ‘counsel, opinion, conjecture’ and is also the origin of our modern word read. [web essay.]
• maladroit | Plenty of maladroit decisions were made.
• interlocutor | He leans toward his interlocutor conspiratorially. [to whisper]
• flout | You can flout convention and you can flout authority, but you cannot use flaunt for flout. [on the words flaunt and flout] | ... plenty of people drive luxury cars and flout the rules [time mag, 2001-07-23]
• recondite |
• speciousness | the crowd suckled politician's specious arguments | fallacy, casuistry, equivocation, sophism, spuriousness.
• enmity | hostility, antagonism, animosity, rancor, antipathy, animus.
• covenant | pledge, vow, bond, convention, pact, compact, bargain.
• egregious | flagrant, glaring, gross, rank.
• burly | Time heals emotional wounds, but apparently so do burly chauffeurs. Right after in the midst of her tiringly raucous breakup with husband Tom, Roseanne Arnold hired a 240-lb. driver and bodyguard. [Time Mag]
• indefatigable | He [John Dewey] is a man of the highest character, liberal in outlook, generous and kind in personal relations, indefatigable in work. [Bertrand Russell]
• maritime | nautical, marine, naval
• behest | ...experiments done at the behest of IBM.
• repertoire | a performance routine
• recidivism
• vita
• renunciation | renounced smoking
• obfuscation | in lousy programing languages, there are usually obfuscation contests.
• malign
• milieu | air; surrounding; ambience
• vindicate
• inquisition | to inquire. Inquisition means to inquire people by torture, properly relished by people who believe in God.
• aloft
• rife | my life's rife with pleasure
• pundit | pundits has lot of opinions, afterall, by definition they are learned man.
• conjoin | conjoined twins are twins that connected physically at birth.
• anathema | When I became interested in philosophy — a subject which, for some reason, was anathema ... | ...One of them is this idea that computers are anathema to mathematics
• exigency | the exigency of mating astonished me, for i perceived the dire consequence that is extinction, of my kind. [Xah Lee]
• nascent | more or less new
• vilification
• urbane
• ransack | the knack of soldiers
• cacophonous
• upbraid
• murk | murky water
• invocation | an invocation of invoking
• reprehensible
• innards | i don't know the innards of my brain, but surely i can think.
• maudlin | that's Chopin's music.
• alms | cry for alms
• muck
• contingency
• racketeer | ...while my mother briefly dated a Rhode Island Mafia-type racketeer.
• saturnine | morose, glum, gloomy, dour
• fusillade | fusillade of potshots from the crowd
• diametrically | Thanks to Apple [computer company], whose thoughts run diametrically opposite of the unix culture: innovation, not regression.
• vapidity | Macintosh : sensational ; Microsoft Windows : vapidity
• synergy | the synergy of dicks and pussies, produce the powers of love
• symbiosis | I'm nothing but a parasite of the brainy. As long as you are alive and _kicking_ on newsgroups, i'm alive and kicking you too. What a _splendid_ symphony of symbiosis in the desert of arid technicality. [mockery by Xah Lee in comp.lang.lisp]
• largess | Companies such as Microsoft are in business to make money, after all, and it's both understandable and legitimate that they should seek some sort of return for their largesse...
• perjure | lie under law
• demagogue
• placid | Lake Placid [title of a stupid 1999 pop film]
• plaintiff | the plaintiff complained that the defendent's underaged boy fucked their underaged daughter
• plantation
• ingenuous | ingenuous is quiet the opposite of ingenious!
• rumble | Rumble in the Bronx [the title of a movie]. Also, video game devices that rumble is called Rumble Pack. (pack for Package)
• maven | Silicon Valley is filled with technological maven.
• amuck | my senses ran amuck, by the sight of her buttock
• leverage | in the history of love, man and woman leverage their positions, sex or no.
• exalt | exalt my status
• riddance | riddance of plaques
• reparation,
• existential
• unbridled | Much has been written about Internet flaming - unbridled online invective that is the Internet equivalent of road rage. In his 1999 study, “A Short History of Rudeness,” the critic Mark Caldwell offered this diagnosis: “Few people, no matter how consumed with inward resentment, would dare speak so unrestrainedly or woundingly in the living presence of strangers, but the personal computer seems to unleash the beast in those who have the urge to shatter social taboos but lack the courage or articulateness to do so viva voce.” [Lance Morrow. 2000/04/01. http://www.time.com/time/daily/0,2960,42247-101000331,00.html]
• arboreal | arboreal ape
• schism | religions are susceptible to schism
• patrician | i cannot stand her patrician manners
• malaise
• indigent
• homily
• sully | make dirty, as in ‘sullied my reputation’
• disparate | disparate is disparate from desperate, as to speak.
• disparage | belittle
• stultify | Your usage of ‘_proper_ isomorphism’ to endeavor a sense of mathematical mapping between two totally ill-defined and disparate things seems to me stultifying. [Xah Lee, 2000/07/24. farcical criticism on Kent Pitman's writings in comp.lang.lisp.]
• sanctify
• convivial
• sapient
• disinterested
• malfeasance
• sentinel | there's this stupid TV drama called The Sentinel, basically a cop with supernatural senses trying to do pop justice, assinine drama of American sensationalism type.
• inopportune | not opportune, bad time
• roster | a roster of FBI wanted
• officious | newsgroups are full of officious advertisers and advisers
• urbane
• proletariat | The aristocrat has to persuade himself that the slave or proletarian or colored man is of inferior clay, and that his suffering do not matter. [Bertrand Russell in What I Believe]
• veracity | Although an attempt has been made to ensure the veracity of the following material, no responsibility is assumed for any use, or for any consequences resulting from any use, of the information contained herein. [from a tech documentation.]
• tumultuous | This book is being published in a tumuluous time... [from the preface of Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier.]
• dearth | ...except the dearth of people who understand mathematics.
• ostracize | My great-great-grandfather, after observing the depth of the lava on the slopes of Etna, came to the conclusion that the world must be older than the orthodox supposed [Bible's 4004 BC] and published this opinion in a book. For this offense he was cut by the county and ostracized from society. [Bertrand Russell on Christianity.]
• pernicious | [Star Trek] ...from the bellicose Klingons to the pernicious Borg...
| noxious, baneful, pestilent, virulent, malignant, pestilential.
• beleaguer | beset, harass, plague, harry, pester, bedevil
| besiege, beleaguer, blockade, invest, siege
• choleric | peppery, waspish, petulant, querulous, snappy, irascible, peevish, testy
• assiduous | ...Then I stopped by the house where my grandmother spent most of her time assiduously trying to spend those millions [dollars].
• gestalt | That's why I read this book three times. I learned something new on every page and unlearned at least one misunderstanding in every chapter. I saw the gestalt between seemingly dissimilar things like modems and radio stations. The breadth and depth of the book yielded fresh fruit on every reading. (a book review)
• requite | Definition for ‘Echo’ (Greek Mythology): A nymph whose unrequited love for Narcissus caused her to pine away until nothing but her voice remained.
• colloquium | The WTR's Carlo was among the most vocal public health advocates at the colloquium. (on health effects of using cell phone)
• convalescence | Some years ago, following a debilitating illness, I started to fill the seemingly limitless days of convalescence by expanding my programming skills.
• adjudge | ...after his compositions were adjudged underwhelming,...
• biddable | acquiescent, docile, amenable
• comeuppance | Soon after arriving there he meets Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a masochist who is perhaps not quite as smart and tough as she thinks she is, and thus obviously in line for a painful comeuppance. [the movie Leaving Las Vegas 1996]
• doctrinaire | imperious, overbearing
| insubordinate, rebellious, mutinous, factious, seditious
• ductile | malleable, plastic, pliable, pliant
• gangling | gangling youth
• gonzo | With two gonzo epics, action star Jackie Chan and director John Woo take on Hollywood.
• hospice | takes place amid loved ones, in the familiar comfort of home or hospice.
• imponderable | difficulties and imponderables...
• interdict | enjoin, proscribe
• outlandish | [this play is] outlandish and entirely plausible...
• puckish | a puckish sense of humor...
• putative | Cold Warriors [TV show title]: [Woody] Allen as the putative spy, with Dom Deluise, Michael J. Fox.
• rabble | In nearly all INTJs [a personality type], others are viewed and classified into two distinct groups. The vast majority of acquaintances are lumped into the category of the helpless rabble, the masses who live out their entire lives in quiet desperation. These are looked upon with quaint fondness at best, with contempt more often.
• ford | The clever donkey quickly learned to roll over while fording a particular stream, thereby dissolving much of the salt and making his burden far lighter.
• arcana | ...the 41-year-old polymath, master of eight languages including Sanskrit as well as the new arcana of atomic physics...
| Along the way he found himself drawn to the spiritual arcana of the Knights Templar [a mystical brotherhood].
• declamation | specious declamation
• detritus | ...the detritus of past civilizations.
• fiat | money by fiat.
• kilter | throw a baby's diet off kilter.
• plaudit | ... she has explored at least a dozen art forms and won plaudits in several ...
• plebiscite | if a plebiscite were held today, ...
• troll | ...But the truth is that the vast majority of people who troll the Internet's byways are there in search of social interaction, not just sterile information.
• rigamarole | ...But if it's only existence of the 1-1 mapping that is supposed to be the ‘paradox,’ you could get that without all the rigamarole just by drawing radii. [CompuServe poster Bill Snyder]
• gloat | I did not come here, as you are assured, to gloat. | Don't gloat, Homer! [Marj Simpson, from Simpsons cartoon]
• hortatory | ...but the second set of directions has a hortatory tone about it.
• behoove | ...So it behooves us to be aware of the difference — sometimes a subtle difference — between cause-and-effect reasoning and antecedent-consequence reasoning.
• equitable | ...to create a more equitable policy of taxation...
• inure | All [political] candidates lie — in a technical sense — every time they read a speech they paid someone else to write.... But the voters have become inured to such petty fabrications.
• unflagging | unflagging pursue of excellence.
• controvert | Answering the why question often involves us in trying to persuade others that our hypothesis about why something happened is a plausible, if not an incontrovertible, one.
• impudicity | Immodesty; shamelessness
• interlope | The cosmic interloper was completely vaporized...[pointing to the comic that extinguished Dinas]
• laundering | Allegations of gunrunning in Australia and money laundering in Canada and Europe.
• untrammeled | Rather than the crude, lumbering gesticulations of the stage-trained actors who were the staples of early films, Griffith began using youthful newcomers untrammeled by years of barnstorming and emphasized Representation.
• disingenuous | ...when he claimed that his computer was “extremely easy to manufacture and to service,” a baldly disingenuous statement we know now...
• stoke | Steve Jobs and his minions had succeeded masterfully in stoking outside expectations by keeping details [of NeXT computer] secret...
• rankle | ...In haste and stammering he performed his part,/ And looked the rage that rankled in his heart. —The Parish Register by George Crabbe.
• wily | Three stories that begin as clichés but soon go wild and wily.
• pandemic | America's pandemic obesity — 33% of U.S. adults ...[are] overweight.
• jocund | ...A poet could not but be gay, in such a jocund company... —William Wordsworth.
• jovial | “... he is a fairly jovial fellow.”
• ulterior | Some industry observers suggested that IBM may have had ulterior motives for knocking Intel's quality, since Big Blue will begin selling the competing PowerPC microprocessor next spring.
• laconic | “that's shit” was his favorite laconic expression.
• usurp | I, like an usurped town to another due (from a poem by John Donne)
• blare | “Put Fidelity's Renowned Investment Management Expertise to Work For You,” blares the brochure.
• dicey | The silver-tongued Ross always extricated himself from dicey situations and ...
• expunge | ...venture forth to expunge the hydra-headed “gry” riddle once and for all.
• seminal | this is a seminal finding.
• tussle | A rogue cop's tussle with the Mob is an exercise in soft porn.
• distraught | ...have received thousands of calls from distraught victims reporting impromptu acts of discrimination that recalled the vigilante spirit of the old Wild West.
• injunction | ...appear to be ignoring the legal injunction and taking enforcement into their own hands.
• cachet | For all that, Star Trek has never won much respect. In the realm of long-running entertainment phenoms, Sherlock Holmes has more history; James Bond, more class Star Wars; and Indiana Jones, more cinematic cachet.
• cataclysm | The ultimate goal of Scriabin's experiments, the Misterium, which was to have resulted in the ecstatic cataclysm of the human race, was left incomplete at his death.
• travail | The story of the deaf in America is intimately bound up with ASL and its travails.
• connive | These connivers didn't just feed a few answers to favored contestants to boost ratings. They destroyed a nation's innocence. [about the movie Quiz Show]
• kiosk | What's to stop publishers from striking out on their own, using the new improved Internet as their online kiosk?
• volley | Is nicotine a drug or not? Both Congress and the FDA need to know before they fire the next volley in the tobacco wars, and they are looking to science for guidance.
• truckle | Nowadays colleges have to hustle for students by truckling trendily.
• mediocrities | The harder and more meaningful questions is whether the mediocrities who have also flooded into colleges in the past couple of generations do better than they otherwise would have.
• quotidian | ...these other countries tend to separate the college-bound from the quotidian masses in early adolescence,...
| ...The virtue of the book is that it captures the quotidian misunderstandings between men and women in the work place.
• postmortem | as the death and postmortem of Comet Shoemaker-Levy unfold, that...
• preponderance | ...Why the preponderance of animals over human images? (prehistoric art found is a cave)
• trounce | Finally, they [American companies] are beating their Japanese, ... rivals — and in products like autos,..., and computer chips, where a few years ago they were being trounced. [Time Mag.]
• ruckus | A new book [The Bell Curve] raises a ruckus by linking intelligence to genetics and race. [Time Mag.]
• forestall | But while such heroic measures can relieve pain and reduce debilitating fatigue, they generally forestall death for only a few years [for heart-disease patients].
• tenable | ...we would have to argue that these are tenable norms for...
• specious | specious declamation
• inveterate | share an inveterate cynicism about corporate messages.... | If you're an inveterate coder, Debian will keep you fiddling happily for eons. [about computer different Operation System “versions”.]
• epitome | ...the epitome of suburban domesticity.
• iniquities | His tough guys chat about life's iniquities and inequities, about hamburgers, the Bible, the ethics of foot massage, the perfidy of women. Sometimes they sound like catty old fishwives. But this is a very male form of gossip — verbal machismo. With their edgy patter, the guys test themselves, their friends, their victims... [probaly from Time Mag, review on the movie Pulp Fiction (1994)]
• puerile | messages on computer networks are so sloppy, meandering, puerile, ungrammatical,...
• sundry | ...or sundry other multilateral constructions.
• conspire | ...while “charm” and “strange” quarks conspire to make more exotic particles...
• panache | they [boxers] brought a desperately needed shot of Ali-style panache to the ring.
• vaunt | ...his most vaunted exploits were exposed as largely fictitious.
• quixotic | She recalls her early life and her quixotic campaign for the presidency of Sex Club 101.
• cortege | retinue
• unflappable | ... transform him in the eyes of his people from a dithering cad into an unflappable semi-hero.;
| The unflappable McCauley still knows exactly what are the right things to do
• sang-froid | praised him for his sang-froid.
• duress | resigned under duress.
• rambunctious | Charles Barkley, the rambunctious Phoenix Suns basketball superstar, is planning to run for Governor of his home state of Alabama in 1996.
• larceny | [on how people lie] An advanced gambit is angrily rebutting a charge that was never made. When Richard Nixon claimed in the midst of Watergate, “I am not a crook,” he was telling a literal truth. He was charged with the abuse of power — not larceny.
• moratorium | Elizabeth Duncan had been gassed [put to death by gas] in California in 1962, before the moratorium on executions.
• renegade | Brad Pitt expertly portrays trailer-park renegades who...
• spurn | ... spurned the offer...
• faze | ...and seemed unfazed by reports of public displays of marital discord between ...
• bibelot | novelty, bauble, trinket, bibelot, gewgaw, gimcrack, knickknack, whatnot.
• ancillary | Aladdin [the movie] has earned $1 billion from box-office income, video sales and such ancillary baubles as Princess Jasmine dresses and Genie cookie jars...
• inimical | male parental investments also makes the man's naturally polygynous bent inimical to his wife's reproductive interests.
• paragon | Women are not by nature paragons of fidelity. Wanderlust is an innate part of their minds, ready to surface under propitious circumstances. [Time mag.]
• scabrous | Jim had material for more scabrous satire.
• deracinate | such cascades of images can prove deracinating.
• sunder | ...people like me inadvertently sundered the tapestry of our lives...
| A ragtag army [the runaways] of the abused and the ignored drifting aimlessly like flotsam out of sundered families.
• splatter | [princess] Diana's image as the innocent wronged woman in a bad marriage was tarnished. Now it has been splattered.
• humdrum, irksome | ...almost humdrum event.
• frisson | ...and mutter a few Gallic epithets, but Gangji, 41, one of the top professional umpires in tennis, chose to ignore this final frisson of petulance.
• excoriate | And indeed The Blue Kite is by far the most excoriating depiction in Chinese film of Mao's ravages.
| chafe, abrade, fret, gall
• maunder | ...maunder and mope...
| Alternative rockers are notoriously mopey...
• demur | kick, remonstrate, expostulate
• disjuncture | The disjuncture between law and practice ...
• trove | scientists unveiled a trove of fossil remains ...
• stigmatize | This [homosexuality] is a stigmatized group. There is probably a lot more homosexual activity going on than we could get people to talk about.
• penultimate | “How far have you gone?”; “I'm at the penultimate level”. (of a video game.)
• mecca | “...Sand Hill Road, the mecca for West Coast venture capital firms.”
• screed | It was a blistering screed that rocked me back on my heels. (that awoke him)
• vitriolic | Surely a person who pours forth vitriolic contempt as you do can stand to be teased lightly? —Robby Villegas. | acrid, truculent, acerbic, acidic, biting, caustic, scathing, vituperative | virulent
• caste | Like any other privileged caste, they use their power for their own advantage.
• perdition | “... He [Herodutus] is not anxious to prove that people who call Zeus by some other name will suffer eternal perdition and ought to be put to death in order that their punishmetn may begin as soon aspossible. —Bertrand Russell on Christianity.”
• provincial |
• aggrandize | After all, such individuals aggrandize themselves by pushing hard on young people who don't understand how they are being taken advantage of.
Page Created:1995. © 1995-2005 by Xah Lee.