Recently Added Articles Page #129

temporize - vocabulary

verbTo gain time or delay acting by being indecisive or evasive; to comply with the time or the occasion, to yield ostensibly to current opinion; to produce a compromise; to come to terms. The third European peace is within reach and the fourth can b...

tenacious - vocabulary

adjectiveUnyielding, holding fast, keeping a firm grip, stubborn, obstinate. Isabel was perfectly aware that she had not taken the measure of Pansy’s tenacity, which might prove to be inconveniently great; but she inclined to think the young girl w...

tenet - vocabulary

nounAn opinion, principle, dogma, or doctrine a person or group believes or maintains as true. A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that “all women are oppressed.” This assertion implies that women share a common lot,...

therefore, therefor - vocabulary

adverbTherefore: serves as a conjunctive adverb or as a regular adverb. When it joins two clauses, it must be preceded by a semicolon and followed by a comma: The court upheld the lower court; therefore, the appellant lost once again. When it serves ...

torpor - vocabulary

nounApathy, sluggish inactivity, a state of suspended physical activity, lethargic indifference. Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.—William Cobbet...

tortious, tortuous, torturous - vocabulary

adjectiveTortious: a legal word that refers to an act that gives ground for a lawsuit based on tort law.Note: The words torturous and tortuous come from the same Latin root “torquere,” which means “to twist.” But their meanings today are dist...

tractable - vocabulary

adjectiveEasily led or controlled, as in a tractable child or tractable voters. The parole board scene, like many other sequences here, attests to the filmmakers' skill at unobtrusively entering the prisoners' world and at avoiding trite, melodramati...

transitive verb - vocabulary

nounNote: The transitive verb is a good thing to know. Because many experienced writers usually know its ins and outs, I’ve included a brief discussion here.Here’s an excerpt from the Parts of Speech section of Grammar.com:Verbs with ObjectsAs Am...

travail - vocabulary

nounHard or agonizing labor, painfully difficult work; anguish or suffering resulting from physical or mental hardship; also, the pain of childbirth. Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.—Henry David T...

travesty - vocabulary

nounA burlesque of a serious work characterized by grotesque incompatibility of style of the original; a grotesque imitation, as in a travesty of justice.Note: Though travesty is often used to mean “a gross injustice,” perhaps from the popular sa...

trepidation - vocabulary

nounNervous uncertainty of feeling; tremulous alarm, fear; quivering movement. Immediately after dinner Kitty came in. She knew Anna Arkadyevna, but only very slightly, and she came now to her sister’s with some trepidation, at the prospect of meet...

truculent - vocabulary

adjectiveFiercely brutal, cruel, vitriolic, scathing, belligerent. The past is present everywhere, but Japan is an unusually history-haunted nation. Elsewhere the Cold War is spoken of in the past tense. Japan, however, lives in a dangerous neighborh...

ubiquitous - vocabulary

adjectiveBeing present everywhere, omnipresent. Hardly a section of the country, urban or rural, has escaped the ubiquitous presence of ragged, ill and hallucinating human beings, wandering through our city streets, huddled in alleyways or sleeping o...

umbrage - vocabulary

nounA sense of injury, annoyance, offense, injury; vague feel of doubt or suspicion; leaves affording shade, shade, or shadows cast by trees. Mr. Jack Maldon shook hands with me; but not very warmly, I believed; and with an air of languid patronage, ...

unctuous - vocabulary

adjectiveCharacterized by excessive moralistic fervor, especially in an affected manner; excessively smooth or smug; characteristic of an unguent or oil, oily, greasy; abundant in organic material, as in unctuous soil. Congress—these, for the most ...

unique - vocabulary

adjectiveBeing the only one of its kind.Note: Be careful and refrain from using adverbs to modify unique, such as very unique, the most unique, extremely unique. Unique means unique. One exception: almost unique.But consider this contrary view from D...

upbraid - vocabulary

verbTo reproach, to find fault, to criticize harshly. I have never worked for fame or praise, and shall not feel their loss as I otherwise would. I have never for a moment lost sight of the humble life I was born to, its small environments, and the c...

utilitarianism - vocabulary

nounThe ethical doctrine that actions are right because they are useful for the greatest number of people. A system of ethics according to which the rightness or wrongness of an action should be judged by its consequences. The goal of utilitarian eth...

vacuous - vocabulary

adjectiveEmpty, without content; lacking in intelligence or ideas; without purpose, idle. Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.—Malcolm Muggeridge “I Like Dwight” Tread Softly for You Tr...

vapid - vocabulary

adjectiveHaving lost sparkling quality and flavor; insipid; flat; dull or tedious. A society in which everyone works is not necessarily a free society and may indeed be a slave society; on the other hand, a society in which there is widespread econom...

vehement - vocabulary

adjectiveVery eager or urgent; zealous, ardent; characterized by rancor or anger; consisting of great exertion or energy. It is very natural for young men to be vehement, acrimonious and severe. For as they seldom comprehend at once all the consequen...

venal, venial - vocabulary

adjectiveVenal: willing to sell one’s influence in return for a bribe; associated with bribery. From what we already know, . . . some churchmen had dealings with the SB [Polish Secret Police] for no other reason than that anyone in Poland who wan...

vernacular - vocabulary

adjectiveConcerning language, indigenous or native, as opposed to learned or literary; using plain, ordinary language; also pertaining to a style of architecture employing techniques, decorative arts, materials, etc., common to a particular place or ...

vestige - vocabulary

nounA visible trace, mark, or impression, of something absent, lost, or gone; a surviving evidence of a condition or practice. Most people with whom I talk, men and women even of some originality and genius, have their scheme of the universe all cut ...

vicarious - vocabulary

adjectiveSuffered, done, received, or exercised in place of another, as in vicarious punishment; serving as a substitute; felt or enjoyed through imagination of experience of others, as in a vicarious thrill. Parents lend children their experience an...