Vocabulary Week 1

Vocabulary Week 24 GoldWord 1: Malinger Def: To try to avoid work by pretending to be hurt Sent: Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. Marcel Proust

Word 2: Foreboding Def: Feeling something bad will happenSent: Even in slight things the experience of the new is rarely without some stirring of foreboding.Eric Hoffer.

Word 3: Ramifications Def: A consequence of an action, often which complicates a situation Sent: When a decision is made to go to war based on intelligence, it is a fateful decision. It has ramifications and impacts way beyond the current months and years. Carl Levin

Word 4: DearthDef: A scarcity or lack of somethingSent: There's no dearth of kindness in this world of ours; Only in our blindness we gather thorns for flowers. Grantland Rice

Word 5: Clientele Def: All the people who regularly use a shop, restaurant or other business Sent: I brought him so much clientele that he had me open my own store and we ended up going into a partnership together. Paul Wall

Word 6: Petty Def: Small and unimportant Sent: Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things. George Carlin

Word 7: Mendacious Def: Having a lying, false character Sent: An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong. Russell Baker

Word 8: Undulate Def: To move in waves, fluctuate Sent: The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat.Hilaire Belloc

Word 9: Bolster Def: To support, hold up, or maintain with difficulty Sent: If we can't turn the world around we can at least bolster the victims.Liz Carpenter

Word 10: Diffuse Def: To spread about or scatter; disseminate Sent: Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker. George Eliot

Word 11: Fiasco Def: An embarrassing failureSent: There's a difference between a failure and a fiasco, ... A fiasco is a disaster of mythic proportions.Orlando Bloom

Word 12: Furtive Def: Secretive and possibly dishonest Sent: These days, acts of racism are furtive. And, all too often, they happen in our own back yard.John Jordan

Word 13: Intolerant Def: Not excepting of others beliefs or behavior Sent: I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strangely, I am ungrateful to these teachers.Kahlil Gibran

Word 14: Integrity Def: The quality of being honest and having strong moral principlesSent: Integrity is doing the right thing, even if nobody is watching. Anonymous

Word 15: Elixir Def: A magical or medicinal potion Sent: I think Meryl Streep has some kind of miracle elixir that makes the Academy nominate her every time she makes a movie.Peter Travers

Word 16: Jubilation Def: A feeling of great happiness and triumph. Sent: Once the team acquired the signal after the spacecraft reappeared from behind Mars, we all felt a tremendous sense of jubilation. Jim Crocker

Word 17: Trite Def: So clich and overused that it consequently has little effect Sent: What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.Wendell Phillips

Word 18: SedentaryDef: Accustomed to sitting or to taking little exerciseSent: We are living in a world that promotes obesity, ... We have become more sedentary. Stephen Daniels

Word 19: Elicit Def: To manage to get information from someone or make someone react the way you want Sent: Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents, which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.Horace

Word 20: Conflagration Def: A large destructive fire Sent: Two World Wars within three decadeshad convinced political leaders from both parties that we could neither afford another planet wide conflagration nor prevent a new one alone.Stephen Schlesinger