addle A distressing number of my readers, however, evidently addled by the siren song of “the third word,” were unable to read my plea for surcease, and so...
chanteuse the slimy Dorian Tyrel (Peter Greene), who runs the Coco Bongo Club, where of course Tina is the slinky chanteuse. “The Mask” (1994-07-29) By...
dossier ...scientists who seek some sign of it must search the dossier of human activity for conduct that cycles with the seasons and might be linked with...
hobnob Near the end of that movie classic “The Wizard of Oz”, the wizard stands in the gondola of a hot-air balloon and bids farewell to the people of the...
barrio Now high school graduation is virtually automatic for adolescent outside the ghettos and barrios, a college education is these days a mere rite of...
cagey It's a good bet that this Carrey — the ventriloquist who wonders poignantly if he has lost his own voice — is a bit of a gag too. The Canadian comic,...
rowdy Even Thomas Jefferson had to contend with a group of drunken rowdies who caused a near riot at the school that he founded, the University of Virginia....
febrile Ever since the roaring critical and commercial success of The World According to Garp (1978), the arrival of a new John Irving↗ novel has been an...
miscue For a few tense days last week, the prestige of the Russian space program — and the well-being of three cosmonauts — was in jeopardy as a planned...
expletive RTFM is a acronym for Read the Fucking Manual! The “fucking” there would be a expletive. comp tech jargon expletive = older meaning: Filling up;...
coeval Surely with mankind the appreciation of flowers must have been coeval with the poetry of love. coeval = Of the same age; existing during the same period...
tenement The unfashionable fact is that Ellison's writing was too refined, elaborate, to be spray painted on a tenement wall. He was a celebrator as much as a...
bolster The scientific skepticism is bolstered by some unusual firsthand evidence. One of Mack's “experiencers” has revealed to TIME that she was actually...
purview A lab test for suicide — the eighth leading cause of death in the U.S. — sounds incredible. Yet it is only one of the promising developments being...
habiliments The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe. ☄ ...
But Prince Prospero was happy and hauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half-depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and...
It was then, however, that Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the sib chambers, while...
retrenchment Partly as a result, airlines have diluted the value of frequent-flyer programs by fully 25%. But few passengers have complained much since United...
chattel Lee: I don't want to go into polemics, but any society in which two innocent Japanese students in Los Angeles can be shot dead because someone wanted...
piddling In the vast arena of international commerce, the action will seem piddling, perhaps involving no more than $25 million in trade. But environmentalists...
voluble There the voluble mouth and bright penetrating eye are ever directed toward the Master of the household Flatland by Edwin A Abbott. voluble = Moving...
founder how their first marriages had foundered in seas of conjugal miscommunication. founder = To become filled with water, and sink, as a ship. ☄ founder...
cartel This interdependence [of Oligopoly economic model] among firms leads to actions not found in the other market structures, such as advertising campaigns...
roil The new chip itself has provoked bitter conflict within IBM. Among other things, IBM hoped the PowerPC would break the stranglehold that Intel has on the...
Wolfgang arrived at Paris at the breaking out of the revolution. The popular delirium at first caught his enthusiastic mind, and he was captivated by the...
argot It was with the onset of the English Restoration in 1660, when public literacy began to flower, that notions about the language started to change. The...
aegis By the mid 1980s, Leary had begun to incorporate computers, the Internet, and virtual reality into his aegis of thought. Leary established one of the...
simulacrum Despite these arguments, cynics, pundits and alternative-music ideologues were predicting Woodstock '94 would be a corporatized simulacrum of the...
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