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The words in this A Word A Day is usually at a level of writers. If you are studying English, see: SAT words and others at English Vocabulary page.
concomitant
Prior to winning the Nobel Prize, her work was largely unknown outside the German-speaking world and was said to resemble that of acclaimed Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard, with its pathology of destruction and its concomitant comedic abrogation.
acrimonious
Disemboweling is evidently the theme du jour. As the political wars rage in this amazingly acrimonious primary season, the skin has been ripped off the establishment in both parties, and their guts have been exposed. We're seeing the pulsing inner workings of partisan ideology as never before.
“Blood-and-guts politics”, by Camille Paglia, 2008-02-13. http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/02/13/political_wars/print.html.
detritus
The house dust mite, is a cosmopolitan guest in human habitation. Dust mites feed on organic detritus such as flakes of shed human skin and flourish in the stable environment of dwellings.
veneer
Now the veneer of credibility, already bruised by allegations of tamper-prone data, secret food caches and smuggled supplies, has cracked. ... The Biospherians will soldier on, but their two-year experiment in self- sufficiency is starting to look less like science and more like a $150 million stunt.
“Biosphere Or Biostunt?”, Time Mag, 1993-03-01.
defraying
In a strictly business evaluation, Biosphere 2 has to be judged a failure of management. There was never any consideration that the project could be profitable, but it had the means of defraying some of its vast expense given that 10,000 visitors a month were paying up to US$80 for the tour at one time.[17] Ed Bass quite evidently believed that the management could be improved upon.
quibble
The most popular career of a Greek of ability at the time was politics; hence the sophists largely concentrated on teaching rhetoric. The aims of the young politicians whom they trained were to persuade the multitude of whatever they wished them to believed. The search for truth was not top priority. Consequently the sophists undertook to provide a stock of arguments on any subject, or to prove any position. They boasted of their ability to make the worse appear the better reason, to prove that black is white. Some, like Gorgias, asserted that it was not necessary to have any knowledge of a subject to give satisfactory replies as regards it. Thus, Gorgias ostentatiously answered any question on any subject instantly and without consideration. To attain these ends mere quibbling, and the scoring of verbal points were employed. In this way, the sophists tried to entangle, entrap, and confuse their opponents, and even, if this were not possible, to beat them down by mere violence and noise. They sought also to dazzle by means of strange or flowery metaphors, by unusual figures of speech, by epigrams and paradoxes, and in general by being clever and smart, rather than earnest and truthful. Hence our word “sophistry”: the use of fallacious arguments knowing them to be such. Early on Sophists were seen to be of merit as people of superior skill or wisdom, as we find in Pindar and Herodotus. We learn from Plato, though, that even in the 5th century there was a prejudice against the name “sophist”. By Aristotle's time, the name bore a contemptuous meaning, as he defines “sophist” as one who reasons falsely for the sake of gain.
“The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy”. Editor James Fieser et al. http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/s/sophists.htm.
palatable
Müllerian mimicry describes a situation where two or more species have very similar warning or aposematic signals and both share genuine anti-predation attributes (e.g. being unpalatable)
abrogation
The Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov informed Tokyo of the Soviet Union's unilateral abrogation of the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact on April 5.
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki↗
cagey
Lynch usually keeps his personal life out of the media or limelight and rarely comments on his films. However, he does attend public events and film festivals when he or his films are nominated/awarded. He is known to be notoriously evasive and cagey in interviews, and refuses to discuss the plot details and “true meanings” of his films, preferring viewers to come away with their own interpretations.
David Lynch↗ (film director)
persona non grata
On June 30, after conducting its own investigation of the attack, the USFSA stripped Harding of her 1994 title and banned her for life from participating in sanctioned events and becoming a sanctioned coach. The USFSA concluded that Harding knew about the attack before it happened and displayed “a clear disregard for fairness, good sportsmanship and ethical behavior.” As part of her plea deal, she had already resigned from the USFSA and given up her spot on the team slated to take part in that year's world championships.[5] Although the USFSA has no control over professional skating events, Harding was also persona non grata on the pro circuit because few skaters and promoters would work with her. Consequently, Harding did not herself benefit from the pro skating boom that ensued in the aftermath of the scandal.[4]
Tonya Harding↗; Persona non grata↗.
free-for-all
During the Middle Ages, tournaments often contained a mêlée consisting of knights fighting one another on foot or while mounted, either divided into two sides or fighting as a free-for-all.
congenital
Cocks possess congenital aggression toward all males of the same species.
bevy
And as he continued in this case lo! a postern of the palace, which was carefully kept private, swung open, and out of it is came twenty slave girls surrounding his brother's wife, who was wondrous fair, a model of beauty and comeliness and symmetry and perfect loveliness, and who paced with the grace of a gazelle which panteth for the cooling stream. Thereupon Shah Zaman drew back from the window, but he kept the bevy in sight, espying them from a place whence he could not be espied. They walked under the very lattice and advanced a little way into the garden till they came to a jetting fountain a-middlemost a great basin of water. Then they stripped off their clothes, and behold, ten of them were women, concubines of the King, and the other ten were white slaves. Then they all paired off, each with each. But the Queen, who was left alone, presently cried out in a loud voice, “Here to me, O my lord Saeed!”
Story Of King Shahryar And His Brother
booty
The Ancient Greeks had many words to describe slaves, though many need to be placed in proper context to avoid ambiguity. In Homer, Hesiod and Theognis of Megara, the slave was called δμώς / dmôs. The term has a general meaning but refers particularly to war prisoners taken as booty...
saturnine
saturnine: Heavy; grave; gloomy; dull; — the opposite of mercurial;
1913 Webster dictionary definition.
chattel
An explicit aspect of Gor is that men are the rulers and women are for the most part chattel; their interactions often feature what some consider the machismic stereotypes of Gorean society.
Gor↗.
de jure
Jiang Hu (江湖), literally means “rivers and lakes” and is translated as “The World of Martial Arts” or “the martial (arts) world”.
The Jiang Hu is a “shared world”, an alternate universe, made up of martial artists and pugilists gathered in wulin (武林), usually congregrating in sects, clans, disciplines and schools of martial arts learnings. It is inhabited by wandering knights and princes, thieves and beggars, priests and healers, merchants and craftspeople. The best wuxia writers draw a vivid picture of the intricate relationships of honor, loyalty, love and hatred between individuals and between communities in this milieu.
A common aspect to jiang hu is the tacit suggestion that the courts of law are dysfunctional. Differences can only be resolved by way of force, predicating the need for xia and their chivalrous ways. Law and order is maintained by the alliance of wulin or wulin mengzhu, the society of martial artists. They are elected and commanded by the most able xia, who is usually (but not always) the protagonist of that novel (in some versions, such as the TV miniseries Paradise, the position is hereditary). This alliance leader is an arbiter, who presides and adjudicates over inequities and disputes. He is a de jure chief justice of the affairs of the jiang hu.
scamper
Quit scampering all over the place.
Conversation
dale
“Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemm'd thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.”
Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem)↗
Note: “Foundling” is used as a noun here. Foundling = A person or thing fondled or caressed; one treated with foolish or doting affection.
etiology
Venus enters the poem “sick-thoughted” with love, and hoists Adonis from the saddle of his horse. She then plies him with kisses, and arguments, but nothing she does or says can rouse him to sexual desire. This he repudiates. By the mid-point of the poem, Adonis has announced his intention to go boar hunting the next morning. Venus tries to dissuade him, and get him to hunt more timid prey. This he ignores, and breaks away from her. She spends the rest of the night in lamentation, at dawn, she hears the sound of the hunt. Full of apprehension, she runs towards the noise, knowing that, as the sound comes from just one place, the hunters are confronting an animal that isn't running away. She comes upon the body of Adonis, fatally gored by the boar's tusks. In her horror and sorrow, the Goddess of Love pronounces a curse upon love: that it will always end badly, and those who love best (like her) will know most sorrow. This curse provides an etiology, a myth of causation, explaining why love is inseparable from pain (this is characteristic of the form).
Venus and Adonis (Shakespeare poem)↗
gracile
The Bonobo is more gracile (slight in form) than the Common Chimpanzee. Its head is smaller than that of the Common Chimpanzee with less prominent eyebrow ridges. It has a black face with pink lips, small ears, wide nostrils, and long hair on its head. Females have slightly more prominent breasts in contrast to the flat breasts of other female apes, though not as prominent as those of humans.
bonobo
But killing was the reason we were in Africa. Dale Peterson and I were exploring the deep origins of human violence, back to the time before our species diverged from rainforest apes, 5 to 6 million years ago. Not only ancestral to humans, those early rainforest apes were also part of a genetic line now represented by the four modern great ape species: orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Both of us had already observed orangutans in Borneo and gorillas and chimpanzees in Africa, but neither of us had yet seen the fourth and rarest ape, the bonobo↗, in the wild.
Demonic Males (Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson)
vizier
But at the end of the twentieth twelvemonth the elder King yearned for a sight of his younger brother and felt that he must look upon him once more. So he took counsel with his Wazir↗about visiting him, but the Minister, finding the project unadvisable, recommended that a letter be written and a present be sent under his charge to the younger brother, with an invitation to visit the elder. Having accepted this advice, the King forthwith bade prepare handsome gifts, such as horses with saddles of gem-encrusted gold; Mamelukes, or white slaves; beautiful handmaids, high-breasted virgins, and splendid stuffs and costly.
Story Of King Shahryar And His Brother
Wazir = Vizier; a high official in a Muslim governmen.
ineptitude
The Economist remarked on the news of the errors that “for someone of Mr Levitt's iconoclasm and ingenuity, technical ineptitude is a much graver charge than moral turpitude ....”
stewardship
By the time Netscape assumed stewardship, the Open Directory Project had about 100,000 URLs indexed with contributions from about 4500 editors.
carousing
Now my cousin and I were sworn friends, for he ever entreated me with exceeding kindness. He killed for me the fattest sheep and strained the best of his wines, and we enjoyed long conversing and carousing. One day when the wine had gotten the better of us, the son of my uncle said to me, “O my cousin, I have a great service to ask of thee, and I desire that thou stay me not in whatso I desire to do!” And I replied, “With joy and goodly will.”
The First Kalandar's Tale (Arabian Nights; Richard Burton)
diadem
Noble patricians, patrons of my right,
Defend the justice of my cause with arms;
And, countrymen, my loving followers,
Plead my successive title with your swords.
I am his first born son that was the last
That wore the imperial diadem of Rome;
Then let my father's honours live in me,
Nor wrong mine age with this indignity.
Titus, act 1 scene 1 (Shakespeare)
declivity
The declivity was so small, that I walked near a mile before I got to the shore ...
Gullivers Travels, part 1 chapter 1 (Jonathan Swift)
fecundity
The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision. And he put it to us in this way—marking the points with a lean forefinger—as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.
Time Machine, chapter 1. (H G Wells)
viand
But man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this. When the Arabs, who had been used to living sparingly on a few dates, acquired the riches of the Eastern Roman Empire, and dwelt in palaces of almost unbelievable luxury, they did not, on that account, become inactive. Hunger could no longer be a motive, for Greek slaves supplied them with exquisite viands at the slightest nod. But other desires kept them active: four in particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.
What Desires Are Politically Important, by Bertrand Russell.
pith
On the subject of the Wooster brain, opinions seem to diverge somewhat. Considering that I am almost constantly occupied in pondering fruity schemes of great pith and moment, as the fellow said, in various capacities as counsellor and intermédiaire to my many friends, it might come as a surprise to an innocent bystander that derogatory epithets have been applied to the said Wooster brain.
Jeeves and the Ph D, anonymous.
menial
I love math. I respect Math. I'm nothing but a menial servant to Mathematics. Who the fuck is this David guy, who proclaims that he's no mathematician, then proceed to tell us he doesn't fucking care about math? Then, he went on about HIS personal fucking zeal for physics, in particular injecting the highly quacky “quantum mechanics” with impunity.
Xah Lee in essay Distributed RVS, Darcs, and Math Sacrilege, 2007-10.
fledge
The previous two posts by Barry Margolin and Kent M Pitman are really good paradigm. Good as paragon of stupid writings. Full fledged in all aspects. Are you about to contribute to this genre?
Xah Lee in comp.lang.lisp, 2000-07-23
contumacious
Thereupon she calls her winged son Cupid, mischievous enough in his own nature, and rouses and provokes him yet more by her complaints. She points out Psyche to him and says, “My dear son, punish that contumacious beauty; give your mother a revenge as sweet as her injuries are great; infuse into the bosom of that haughty girl a passion for some low, mean, unworthy being, so that she may reap a mortification as great as her present exultation and triumph.”
Cupid and Psyche (Lucius Apuleius; Thomas Bulfinch)
swipe
Here, i swiped it for you. (swipe = filch)
Dialogue from Japanese animation Spirited Away↗, 2001.
purloin
The penis of Napoleon was reportedly severed at his autopsy, and purloined: it was some years later sold to a urologist for $40,000.
abject
By any measure the project [Fifth-generation computer] was an abject failure. At the end of the ten year period they had burned through over 50 billion yen and the program was terminated without having met its goals. The workstations had no appeal in a market where single-CPU systems could outrun them, the software systems never worked, and the entire concept was then made obsolete by the internet.
heist
... in Fremont, California, burglars disarmed a security system and made off with more than $1.8 million of chips and computer equipment in a January warehouse heist.
Your Chips Or Your Life!↗ By JOHN GREENWALD. May. 02, 1994. Time Mag.
The film is a comedy about a jewel heist, planned by George Thomason (played by Tom Georgeson), and its aftermath.
strained
The porter was so dazzled he could hardly believethat he heard her aright, but he shoulderedhis basket in hot haste, saying in himself, “O day of good luck! O dayof Allah's grace!” and walked after her till she stopped at the doorof a house. There she rapped, and presently came out to her an oldman, a Nazarene, to whom she gave a goldpiece, receiving from him in return what she requiredof strained wine clear as olive oil, and sheset it safely in the hamper, saying, “Liftand follow.”
5. The Porter And The Three Ladies Of Baghdad
aright = In a proper manner; correctly.
strain = to pull thru a strainer.
hamper = A large basket, usually with a cover.
abroad
But I was troubled and made restless by my wife's absence andcould not sleep, for although my eyes were closed, my mind andthoughts were wide-awake. Presently I heard the slave girl at myhead say to her at my feet: “O Mas'udah, how miserable is ourmaster and how wasted in his youth, and oh! the pity of his beingso betrayed by our mistress, the accursed whore!” The otherreplied: “Yes indeed. Allah curse all faithless women andadulterous! But the like of our master, with his fair gifts,deserveth something better than this harlot who lieth abroad everynight.”
The Tale Of The Ensorceled Prince
abroad = in wide circulation; about; at large.
plume
You profess to see, whereas you see nothing but a Point! You plume yourself on inferring the existence of a Straight Line; but I can see Straight Lines, and infer the existence of Angles, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and even Circles. Why waste more words?
science fiction Flatland - Part 1, Section 14.
wool-gathering
For a minute, perhaps, my mind was wool-gathering.
Time Machine, chapter 2, by H G Wells.
deadlocked
The jury deadlocked on four of the 22 statements over which Pagones had sued, and eight statements were found non-defamatory.
altercation
In the 2000s, Crumb became increasingly ambivalent about continuing to contribute to new issues of Zap. By issue #14 he announced to the other artists he wasn't interested in continuing; this resulted in a brief physical altercation with Victor Moscoso, in which Moscoso slapped Crumb and called him “Mr. Fucking Moviestar!”
Page created: 2004-01. © 2004 by Xah Lee.