Week 11

Poignant comes from the Latin pungere "to prick," the same root as pungent. But something that's pungent pricks your sense of smell, whereas poignant refers to something that pricks your emotions, especially in a melancholy way. Movie critics might describe a touching portrayal as poignant if there isn't a dry eye in the house.

Commonly used to refer to a deluge of water, inundate can also refer to an overflow of something less tangible, like information. Right before the holidays, toy stores are often inundated with eager parents scrambling to get the latest action figures and video games. Attempt to read the entire dictionary in one sitting and you'll inundate your mind with vocabulary. But you probably won't remember any of it tomorrow. Mnemo:- I+NUN +DATE....I asked the NUNs for a DATE and i was FLOODED with letter

When you were young you may have played the game telephone, where one student thinks up a line, whispers it to his neighbor, who whispers it to his neighbor, and so on, down the line. At the end, the last person to receive the message shouts it out; it usually has nothing to do with what the first person said: it has been garbled along the way. Most of the change is accidental, the price of being human and imperfect — you hear "dope" rather than "hope." Besides messages, facts can get garbled —

it described someone whose ruddy complexion was a sign of an optimistic outlook. That was back when people thought that "bodily humors" like blood were responsible for your attitudes. Now that we no longer believe in humors, sanguine has settled down as a fancy way to say someone is cheerfully confident. Experts are frequently described as feeling sanguine about a political or economic situation — or not sanguine, if they think we're going to hell in a handbasket.

It may be their training more than their natural behavior, but those palace guards who wear the red coats and big hats and show absolutely no expression on their faces are phlegmatic. Attempts to make them laugh, smile, or twist their faces in irritation won’t work, because being phlegmatic is important to their role as stone-faced keepers of the palace. Phlegmatic people show less emotion on the outside — but who knows, they may be jumping up and down on the inside.

For example, a witness in court corroborates the testimony of others, and further experimentation can corroborate a scientific theory. Near synonyms :- substantiate confirm

In business, comprehensive insurance is insurance that covers a broad range, offering protection against most risks of a certain type. It applies mainly to car insurance.

Zealous is the adjective for the noun zeal "eager partisanship"; the latter has a long e, but zealous has a short one: ZEL-uhs. It can have a slightly negative connotation, and people are sometimes described as "overzealous," meaning they try too hard. "Zealous" rhymes with "jealous" (and in fact they're from the same Greek word), but don't confuse them: a jealous person might be resentful of someone who makes zealous efforts to achieve success.

If you're at a point where you feel like you need to coerce someone into doing something, it might be more civilized to just give up. To coerce is to manipulate, use aggressive arguments, pressure unfairly, or threaten — really, this isn't very civilized behavior, is it? Handy synonyms for this verb include force and pressure. In a gangster film, you might hear a character say he "put the squeeze" on someone — another way of saying he coerced them.

If two weeks have elapsed between your tennis lessons, there has been a two-week lapse between sessions. Time is one of those things that really does tend to slip away, unless you're sitting through a lecture on the nature of time. Then, it might feel like years elapse when really it is just a few minutes.

Someone who's meticulous is afraid of what will happen if they're not careful enough to get every detail right. "Detail oriented" and "perfectionist" are other ways of describing someone who cares deeply about the small things and about getting things exactly right, every time. Concert pianists must be meticulous, because audiences are always listening for wrong notes.

Do you live somewhere? Such as in a house, on a houseboat, or in an apartment? Then you have a domicile, or simply, housing. Or in the eyes of the law, your legal place of residence. You can turn domicile into a verb, and say that you are currently domiciled in the Caribbean — but you'd really only use that terminology if you were on trial for tax evasion

While contemplating the word lax, you may note that it's the same as the first syllable in laxative. This is not a coincidence: lax entered English as a noun describing a substance taken or administered to relax the bowels. Interestingly, the modern definition of lax is closer to the Latin source word, laxus — an adjective meaning "loose." Now, lax can refer to any phenomenon that is insufficiently stringent or so slack as to be basically ineffectual. For example, "The entire class performed inc

A specialized use of sporadic is to describe a disease that appears only occasionally in random cases, and is therefore not an epidemic. A very near synonym is intermittent.

a "rash decision" is a sudden, not well thought out one. Rash, the noun that no one wants on their skin, came a few hundred years after that, but from the French word rache which at some point meant "ringworm." Ringworm still gives us a red, itchy rash. Fun! Rash can also mean a lot of unpleasant things happening in a short amount of time, like robberies or earthquakes.

You can see how the word conjecture means that you create a theory or opinion about something without basing it in fact because the original definition of conjecture, from Old French, is "interpretation of signs and omens." Since signs and omens are pretty subjective, it makes sense that the word would then move to its current meaning. However, even though it only seems like weather reports are conjectures, they are actually based on evidence!

All of the synonyms for the adjective lurid describe qualities that can turn a person pale: dreadful, nightmarish, and horrific, among others. Lurid is just a uniquely dark and gruesome word.

A quip, often taken as a sign of cleverness, is a witty remark that sounds spur-of-the-moment. A successful quip must sound offhand, as though it were an afterthought, even if the speaker has been honing the statement for days. Dorothy Parker was a famous writer known for her quick quips, such as, "The best way to keep children home is to make the home atmosphere pleasant — and let the air out of the tires."