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Vocabulary Study: Special Meaning Words

keynote

When writer Christopher Buckley gave the keynote address at the annual evening banquet of the Yale Daily News last month, he was so outraged by the boorish behavior of audience members, many of whom had been drinking since the afternoon, that he castigated them in a New York Times Op Ed piece.

Higher Education: Crocked on Campus (A backlash against college drinking) (1994-12-19) By Christine Gorman, Time Mag.

• campy │ Star Trek has evolved over the years from the brash, sometimes campy original series, with its Day-Glo colors and dimestore special effects.

• worldly │ Juliet's father is an English canon, and the girl is blond, worldly, brash...

• prune │ Logo is lisp, and Object Logo is, by and large, a pruned and manicured version of Apple Lisp. [CompuServe user, Mark Warrian, early 1990s]

• spruce │ sprucing up your code...

• cheeky │ suggest that it was written by the glib and cheeky author.

• glib │ I'm sorry I was glib without being clear... [CompuServe user, Mark Warrian, early 1990s].

• sprawl │ ...So the issue is not urban sprawl.

• outing │ outings at the ballet.

• picket │ protesters who picket the event.

• fetchingly │ [she] displays a fetching array of frilly panties, garter belts, stocking tops and high heels ...

• sharper │ a 19th century sharper.

• scale │ He can scale an ordinary playing card across the stage with such force that it pierces a watermelon. [Time mag, Tricky Ricky, 1994-02-14]

• swamp │ financial swamp.

• racy │ Risqué; ribald

• summary │ summarily destroyed at birth.

• beavering │ ...the Clinton Administration is beavering away at putting people to work...

• hub │ ...its New York hub.

• fence │ ...and thus could make stolen goods harder to fence.

• cricket │ It's not cricket to cheat at cards.

• pacemaker │ the fashion house that is the pacemaker.

• marshaled │ marshal all the relevant facts for the presentation.

• gummed │ gummed up the works.

• seedy │ a seedy hotel in a run-down neighborhood.

• lobby │ lobbied the bill through Congress.

• bearing │ the poise and bearing of a champion.

• while │ while the hours away.

• pitch │ sales pitch.

• angle │ Angle for promotion.

• quench │ slake, extinguish

• wake │ vigil

• underscore

• feeler

• instrumental │ Scientific American [a magazine] is intrumental in developing my interest of science.

• rail │ O, that I knew thy heart, and knew the beast, That I might rail at him to ease my mind! [Titus Andronicus, Act 2 Scene 4, Shakespeare]

• career │ to move with speed

• hail │ to fall like hailstone: hailing insults

• steward

• pelt

• scourge │ Once angain the scourge of the Internet age — a computer virus — had struck.

• brief

• condemn

• refrain

• hem

• bristle

• domino

• rout

• appreciate

• drove

• waffle │ My dad has a joke about journalists being paid by the word... hence all the waffle they come out with.

• scrub

• boss

• conservatory

• slight

• hedge

• gouge

• dinky

• patrimony

• bustle

• breach │ ...in the breach...

• buffet

• infirm

• clip

• sheriff

• equipage

• ether

• pulp

• extravaganza

• vigilante │ It [hanging] became so much a part of American culture that it was a preferred method of vigilantes... [Time Mag, early 1990s?]

• scour │ The detective scoured the scene of the crime for clues.

• pitfall

• fray │ MIT Profs Get Into Patent Fray with AskJeeves. (article title.)

• turnip

• bunting

• disgorge

• gorge, ravine

• cloy, surfeit, glut, satiate, sate

• zealot

• tackle

• scuttle

• rent

• implicate

• hideous

• scrub

• lot │ kind, type

• matrix

• seamy

foundry

i have a lesson for smart asses, that poesy is not found in thesaurus, but thesaurus is the foundry of poem, only if you are not an ass.

Xah Lee, 2000-04

palmy

The church no longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its palmy days.

Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? by Bertrand Russell