perdition Before the rise of Christianity this persecuting attitude was unknown to the ancient world except among the Jews. If you read, for example, ...
aggrandize After all, such individuals aggrandize themselves by pushing hard on young people who don't understand how they are being taken advantage of. ...
larceny Dubious Denials. Cornered by the press, the scandal-scarred politician finally deigns to answer the charges against him. Listen to his language...
moratorium Elizabeth Duncan had been gassed in California in 1962, before the moratorium on executions. moratorium = a legally authorized postponement before...
ancillary Moreover, Aladdin has earned “$1 billion from box-offices income, video sales and such ancillary baubles as Princess Jasmine dresses and Genie...
inimical Meanwhile, male parental investment also makes the man's naturally polygynous bent inimical to his wife's reproductive interests. His quest for a new...
paragon So here is problem No. 1 with the pair-bond thesis: women are not by nature paragons of fidelity. Wanderlust is an innate part of their minds, ready to...
scabrous Jim had material for more scabrous satire. “World's Only Living Toon” (1994-08-08) By Richard Corliss. Time Mag. (Source↗ 2008-08) scabrous =...
sunder Runaways. They are the refugees from a million private wars being waged across America — a ragtag army of the abused and the ignored drifting...
splatter Diana↗'s image as the innocent wronged woman in a bad marriage was tarnished. Now it has been splattered. ? splatter = covered patchily; often used...
humdrum The quickening pace and mounting numbers have reduced what often used to be, a spectacle into an almost humdrum event. Today few people in town other...
piebald Then the scorpion changed to a vulture and the serpent became an eagle, which set upon the vulture and hunted him for an hour's time, till he became a...
churlish Potential tantrum defused. Gilbert went quietly to his demise thereafter, although he did drop-kick his racket into the net after the final point and...
excoriate And indeed The Blue Kite↗ is by far the most excoriating depiction in Chinese film of Mao's ravages. But at its heart it is about domestic dreams,...
mope ... maunder and mope ... maunder = To mutter; to mumble; to grumble; to speak indistinctly or disconnectedly; to talk incoherently. Alternative rockers...
disjuncture When France's stiff antismoking laws took effect in late 1992, people girded for some of the nastiest civil unrest since the storming of the...
ho-hum Industry says ho-hum to Netscape suit “Industry says ho-hum to Netscape suit” (2002-01-22) By Rachel Konrad. CNET News. (Source↗ 2008-09) On AOL...
drop-dead It's relatively simple to understand although a tad clumsy at times... None of them are drop-dead simple. Programer Jon Frisby, on unix version...
double-cross Left for dead after a heist double-cross, bad, bad man Mel Gibson returns for revenge in this gritty-yet-glossy remake of John Boorman's...
strung-out Sam has to contend with managing the bosses' skim going out the back door, cheats at the tables, the law breathing down his neck, and strung-out...
in-kind ... About 60 % of all poor households receive in-kind transfers ... in-kind = Given in goods, commodities, or services rather than money: cash and...
stage-struck In her girlhood and before her marriage with Tom Willard, Elizabeth had borne a somewhat shaky reputation in Winesburg. For years she had been...
fuddy-duddies [synthetic language as an lingua franca] have the disadvantage that they are associated with fuddy-duddies possibly a book on Esperanto↗. ...
run-ins Mitnick's run-ins with the law began as a teenager ... ? On computer hacker Kevin Mitnick↗. run-in = a angry dispute. have-nots City grocery stores...
hanger-on Attempting to portray Shipp as a mendacious hanger-on and frustrated actor with a drinking problem, attorney Carl Douglas accused the witness of ...
ad-lib When he was showing how a NeXT workstation could be used to query a database that ran on another company's server, the NeXT machine crashed. Jobs...
mock-up so the champion of Framemaker sat down and said that he would work on a mock-up. ? mock-up = full-scale working model of something built for study...
washed-up As the manacled prisoner came face-to-face with justice for the first time, he strove to uphold the swaggering image he had so carefully cultivated...
last-ditch A last-ditch effort gets food to orbiting cosmonauts, saving their mission from a disastrous early end. Title summary for news article: “Close...
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