week 21

Something with opulence is drenched in wealth and luxury. You'll need gold brocaded curtains, diamond-encrusted watches, and a world-renowned personal chef if you want to add some opulence to your life.
Not surprisingly, the noun opulence comes from the Latin opulentia, meaning “wealthy.” A word that suggests extravagant excess, opulence describes lavish and visibly over-the-top living. Synonyms include abundance, prosperity, and riches.

Lush describes something growing in abundance, like the lush green grass that covers the lawn in the spring.
Lush usually describes thick healthy plant growth, like the jungles of the rainforest that were so lush you couldn't walk through without chopping down branches.Plants full of juice are lush, which is perhaps why a person who drinks too much alcohol is called a lush.

A disciple is a follower or a fan of someone. You might consider yourself to be a disciple of your favorite yoga teacher.
The noun disciple comes from the Latin word discipulus, which means "student, learner, or follower." One of the earliest places disciple showed up was in the Bible, where it means "a follower of Jesus," sometimes specifically one of the twelve Apostles. It's still used that way in religious speech and writing, but it can also describe a serious, dedicated follower or student

If you plant a seed, water it daily and give it lots of light, you nurture it until it is ready to be transplanted outside. When you nurture a person or thing, you care for it and help it to grow.
After a fight with your friend, you may have to nurture the relationship a little until you're close again. Use the phrase "nature versus nurture" to help you remember the word. Nature is a baby just out of the womb. Nurture is how that baby is raised or taken care of.

Use the word scion when talking about a young member of a family that is known to be wealthy, powerful or otherwise important, such as a prince, heiress or the children of, say, the President.
Scion sounds a little bit like son, which is helpful because it almost always means the son, daughter or descendant of a rich or prominent family. Its earliest examples were used to refer to the young shoots of larger, older plants. It's not surprising, then, that over the centuries its meaning has shifted

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" is the first line of Edgar Allen Poe's poem The Raven. Many a deep thinker has repeated it while musing. But if you've given up deep thinking, you may say instead, "Nevermore." People sometimes use the word ironically, for example, when someone asks you to do something you really don't want to do. You may tap your chin for a second and say, "Let me ponder that." Pause. "Um, no!"
Think of ponder as reflecting on weighty thoughts.

In Kafka's novel entitled Metamorphosis, a man wakes up to find he has turned into a cockroach. That kind of complete and startling change pretty much sums up the word.
When a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it goes through a metamorphosis. An idea can undergo metamorphosis, or metamorphosize, too as can feelings. After you spend a full summer with your grandmother, your feelings about the woman may undergo a complete metamorphosis.

Something bona fide is the real deal, the real McCoy, genuine — it's not a fake or a counterfeit.
We talk about things being bona fide when we're interested in how real or genuine they are. A counterfeit hundred dollar bill is not bona fide. When you earn your college diploma you're a bona fide college graduate. If you spend your whole life studying music, you're a bona fide musician. The opposite of bona fide is fake.

If you disapprove of the overly submissive way someone is acting — like the teacher's pet or a celebrity's assistant — call them by the formal adjective obsequious.There are many words in the English language for a person or an action that is overly obedient and submissive. Obsequious people are usually not being genuine; they resort to flattery and other fawning ways to stay in the good graces of authority figures. An obsequious person can be called a bootlicker, a brownnoser or a toady. You ca

Destitution is an unfortunate state in which a person lacks something important — like money, food, companionship, or even hope.Everyone is down on their luck sometimes. Most people will get seriously sick at some point, lose a job, or have a marriage fall apart. However, most people won't fall into destitution, which is a truly hopeless state. Homeless people are in a state of destitution. People starving or without medical care are in a state of destitution.

Penance is the act of doing a good deed to make up for past wrongs. Shoveling your neighbor's sidewalk all winter could be your penance for not helping rake the leaves that dropped from your tree into his yard during the fall.
Although the noun penance can mean any remorse for past mistakes, or any voluntary action meant to right the wrong, Penance When a person receives Penance, he or she confesses sins to a priest, and along with a blessing, receives an order to do something, such as say certa

Salvation is the act of saving from sin or evil, or sometimes just from an unpleasant situation.Salvation doesn't always have to do with theology; if a freak snowstorm on your camping trip has you worried about hypothermia, salvation can come in the form of an abandoned house with a working fireplace.

If you indoctrinate someone, you teach that person a one-sided view of something and ignore or dismiss opinions that don’t agree with your view. Cults, political entities, and even fans of particular sports teams are often said to indoctrinate their followers.
If you indoctrinate someone, the goal is to have that person follow a particular set of beliefs (or a doctrine), rather than being able to think independently or know right from wrong.

Think of a supplication as sort of a prayer, a request for help from a deity. The word carries a sense of awe and adoration with it, suggesting something tentative, even servile, a respectful appeal to a higher power.While a supplication is often thought of as a religious prayer (it is used 60 times in the Bible), it can logically be applied to any situation in which you must entreat someone in power for help or a favor.

Want to live an ascetic lifestyle? Then you better ditch the flat panel TV and fuzzy slippers. To be ascetic, you learn to live without; it's all about self-denial.Ascetic can be a noun: a person with incredible self-discipline and the ability to deprive herself, or an adjective that describes such a people or their lifestyle.

Nirvana is a place of perfect peace and happiness, like heaven. In Hinduism and Buddhism, nirvana is the highest state that someone can attain, a state of enlightenment, meaning a person's individual desires and suffering go away.

Compliments usually make you feel pretty good, but fulsome compliments, which are exaggerated and usually insincere, may have the opposite effect.Hundreds of years ago fulsome used to mean "abundant," but now it's more often used to describe an ingratiating manner or an excess of flattery that might provoke an onlooker to mime gagging. If you find fulsome to be a rather clunky word, there are several fun (if vaguely stomach-churning) synonyms, including buttery, oily, oleaginous, and smarmy.

Whether in reference to chocolate cake for breakfast or wild all-night parties, decadence means extravagance, luxury, and self-indulgence with a sense of moral decline.Decadence is not simply a synonym for excess; it also suggests that one's morals have gone down. The word is usually negative but not always. When hostile critics called a group of French writers and artists in the late 1800s decadents, these poets and painters embraced the label.

If you lack a definite plan or purpose and flit from one thing to another, your actions are desultory. Some people call such desultory wanderings spontaneous. Others call it "being lost."The adjective desultory comes from the word desultor, which was a circus rider who would leap from the back of one galloping horse onto another. From this literal sense of jumping from one thing to another, we get the modern meaning of desultory as jumping between things without a logical purpose.

Materialism describes the belief that buying and having possessions is not just important, but a key to happiness in life, like the people whose materialism has so clouded their minds that they are more interested in your clothes and shoes than in what you are saying.Materialism has the word material in it. What is material? Well, it's stuff — anything you can see and touch, like a pile of books or a big, green lawn. To be material, a thing has to have physical form, unlike emotions, beliefs, de