aesthetic
/ɛsˈθɛtɪk/
adjectiverelating to the enjoyment or appreciation of beauty or art, especially visual art.
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Examples
1. It has aesthetics.
2. So the main changes here are aesthetic.
3. Up on Mount Washington, aesthetics are secondary.
4. The aesthetics were the aesthetics of the straight line.
5. Is your motivation purely aesthetic?
archaic
/ɑɹˈkeɪɪk/
adjectivedating back to the ancient past
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Examples
1. We encountered and interbred with archaic hominin populations within and outside of Africa along the way.
2. It is archaic.
3. His stuff seems archaic NOW!
4. His pictures described as archaic, tribal, and of elemental power.
5. When he speaks about matters of chivalry he uses archaic words drawn from the romances of chivalry.
cosmopolitan
/ˌkɑzməˈpɑɫətən/
adjectiveincluding a wide range of people with different nationalities and cultures
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Examples
1. The cosmopolitan is well aware of differences.
2. These cities were rather cosmopolitan.
3. - I'm cosmopolitan now.
4. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
5. So, the cosmopolitans had a very different worldview.
elegiac
/ˈɛlɪdʒək/
adjectiveexpressing or displaying the sadness and sorrow felt due to loss, death, or a past event
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Examples
1. It's an elegiac tapestry of the old west that was, and it's full of brotherhood, betrayal, and just straight-up beautiful landscapes.
2. This is the question now: is it properly elegiac?
3. The elegiac tone of this final section of the poem should give us some clues to the type of victory over paganism that Christ's birth is actually heralding here.
4. Dante changes this idea of this circularity, the elegiac quality of death and life that we have in Virgil.
5. It's an elegiac way.
fecund
/fˈɛkʌnd/
adjectiveable to create many great intellectual or creative ideas, things, etc.
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Examples
1. So that's the checklist: Friendly - Feedable - Fecund - Family Friendly
2. Hard Kill presents a lot more of the same from this thrifty and fecund partnership, so if you liked the first two, chances are good you'll find something to enjoy in the third.
3. The mother just thought her child had a fecund imagination and so she didn’t think any more about it.
4. We are told that if your dots are way above the stick of the i you have a very fecund imagination.
5. But Murad was fecund and sired at least 20 more sons after he became the sultan.
grandiloquent
/ɡɹænˈdɪɫəkwənt/
adjectiveusing literary, elaborate, or formal language or style with the intention to impress other people
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1. So it's nice to have a grandiloquent, overarching philosophy of never do anything.
2. This is a kind of grandiloquent argument for fiction as opposed to history.
jejune
/ˌdʒɛˈdʒun/
adjectivedisplaying simplicity, immaturity, or inexperience
Examples
lugubrious
/ɫuɡˈjubɹiəs/
adjectiveextremely sorrowful and serious
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Examples
1. It was sort of lugubrious sometimes.
2. And did you see those sweets, it was like trembling, cold, lugubrious, egg pudding meat.
3. So get used to this very sort of ominous and lugubrious set.
4. Do you know what lugubrious means, I do.
5. Do you know what lugubrious means?
pedestrian
/pəˈdɛstɹiən/
adjectivelacking elements that arouse interest, cause excitement, or show imagination
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Examples
1. Pedestrian is good.
2. Pedestrian is good.
3. Pedestrians alone make up almost 17% of traffic deaths.
4. Pedestrians are vulnerable road users.
5. Pedestrians might be crossing this road.
philistine
/ˈfɪɫəˌstin/
adjectivenot being interested, fond, or understanding of serious works of music, art, literature, etc.
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Examples
1. What's the Philistine's name?
2. He's fighting a different philistine.
3. He is the Philistine champion from Gath.
4. They ruined their chance for freedom from the Philistine yoke.
5. That philistine couldn't care less before and now he loves it?
ponderous
/ˈpɑndɝəs/
adjectivepossessing the quality of being very boring, slow, and serious, particularly used for speeches and writings
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Examples
1. After the load has been safely secured in its sling a drag parachute is released to stabilize the ponderous cargo in flight The journey back over the mountains gets underway.
2. Just like with last year's 11 Pro Max in exchange for its ponderous pocket print, you get a lot more screen space and a lot more endurance.
3. And while the wireless reverse charging was something of a bust, you can lend some of your ponderous power supply to someone else using a USB cable.
4. As the ponderous load of bloatware makes plain.
5. Breaking camp at sunrise, Guy’s army began its ponderous eastward march over Galilee’s dusty plains in the blistering summer heat.
trite
/ˈtɹaɪt/
adjective(mainly of ideas, opinions, or remarks) used so often that it no longer has the same effect, interest, or originality
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Examples
1. To say it was likely awe inspiring is almost trite.
2. Affection is too trite a word to capture the meaning of the long stares, wide eyed glances and broad smiles of these proud people and their portrait artist.
3. The trite phrase is "back to the land."
4. But if you just hear the words, they become trite.
5. This may seem super trite.
cacophony
/kæˈkɑfəni/
nouna literary device that uses a mixture of unpleasant, inharmonious, and harsh sounds to depict disorder or chaos
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Examples
1. I didn't like the cacophony of laughter.
2. It's just a gorgeous cacophony symphony in my mouth.
3. The cacophony was absolutely deafening because the ship was coming apart in the water.
4. At this point, a shattering cacophony of cymbals, gongs and war cries broke out as the Muslims tried to intimidate their enemy.
5. it's like a cacophony of madness?
crescendo
/kɹɪˈʃɛndoʊ/
nouna slow and constant increase in the loudness of a musical piece
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Examples
1. We had to crescendo.
2. [Narrator 1] But now the enemy attack rose to a crescendo.
3. The fight’s crescendo involves implausibly flammable vodka and Jeff’s face going missing.
4. A crescendo of Hungarian artillery fired across the battlefield.
5. And then it crescendoed.
ersatz
/ˈɛɹˌsɑts/, /ˈɛɹˌzɑts/
adjectiveartificial and inferior
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Examples
1. Nevertheless, as I say, he's rather cheerful about the fact that at least race is being discussed, unlike the twentieth century when the whole thing is swept under the rug and a kind of ersatz and hypocritical politeness prevents anybody from talking about such categories at all, and gives rise to the idea that we all exist in the same Great Tradition, that work either belongs to that tradition or, if it for some reason seems egregious or outside the tradition, it just can be shoved aside and neglected.
hyperbole
/haɪˈpɝbəˌɫi/
nouna technique used in speech and writing to exaggerate the extent of something
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Examples
1. Like an overvalued startup, unchecked hyperbole has driven its mental market share way out of proportion.
2. The hyperbole will flow for days-- or not hyperbole.
3. Everything is hyperbole.
4. That's not hyperbole.
5. And thousands is no hyperbole.
lament
/ɫəˈmɛnt/
nouna song, musical piece, poem, etc. that expresses the feeling of sorrow and sadness after a loss or death
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Examples
1. Customers and reporters have lamented the loss of the seamless Apple store.
2. Number 74 laments the destruction of the temple.
3. He lamented his underage drinking charge.
4. And the newspapers lament their passing.
5. Kris Tompkins laments the destruction and inequality in the world.
lampoon
/ɫæmˈpun/
nouna drawing, speech, or text aiming to criticize something or someone in a humorous manner
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Examples
1. It was widely lampooned I think by the press.
2. He wasn't lampooning just one composer, but rather the classical music establishment, which he felt was stuck in the past.
3. In 2021, fully 75 years after Charlie Chaplin famously lampooned working conditions in industrial America.
4. Jordan lampooned Murray's basketball dreams but his golf buddy has come through when the Tune Squad faced unpreparedness at crunch time.
5. During this scene, the princesses and Vanellope lampoon a number of typical Disney cliches: their endless singing, their reliance on male characters, and their weird tendency to figure things out about themselves after staring into a pool of water.
malapropism
/mˈæleɪpɹˌɑːpɪzəm/
nounthe humorous and incorrect use of a word that sounds similar to the intended word
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Examples
1. As co-founder of the phenomenal word reference site Wordnik and one time chief editor of American Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, including editing the second edition of The New Oxford American Dictionary, Erin McKean, notes, All words (aside from unintentional errors and malapropisms) are words at their birth.
2. But one of the guys that I knew, I've got to get back to the topic in a minute, but I just thought of this, was sort of the king of malapropisms.
monotony
/məˈnɑtəni/
nounthe constant lack of change and variety that is boring
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Examples
1. Humans, don't like monotony.
2. There’s a lot of monotony.
3. It breaks up monotony.
4. The arrival of visitors always breaks the monotony.
5. They earned this break from the tiresome monotony of the daily grind.
palimpsest
/ˈpæɫɪˌsɛst/
nouna manuscript that was written on, erased, and written on again and again, while the previous text was still partially visible
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Examples
1. These lines make a poor but portable museum, a set of sketches, palimpsests, faint and painfully incomplete that map the territory of a human with arrows pointing in every direction.
2. Cicero's Republic, rediscovered in the nineteenth century, is a palimpsest.
3. And you'll have heard in section-- and in the Beinecke tour, a palimpsest is a manuscript that has been scraped of its old text, a new text put on.
4. Some pages are overwritten, creating difficult-to-decipher palimpsests of long-gone landscapes.
5. And you know, I think of all of these organisms as palimpsests.
preamble
/pɹiˈæmbəɫ/
nounan introductory or preliminary section of a book, statute, document, etc. giving information about its purpose
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Examples
1. The preamble of Constitution speaks about general welfare.
2. Eleven years later, Gouverneur Morris writes the preamble to the Constitution.
3. Preamble over.
4. That is a preamble.
5. We love the Preamble.
prologue
/ˈpɹoʊɫɑɡ/
nounthe beginning section of a movie, book, play, etc. that introduces the work
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Examples
1. So the prologue of the book starts with an account of his--
2. The Power Couple’s downward descent was prologue to Perón’s appointment of a friend of Evita’s as head of the Department of Posts and Telegraph.
3. Second, the historical prologue bridges the gap between generations.
4. So we get the pre-existence of Jesus and his divinity, right there in the prologue.
5. - That was just the prologue?
recapitulation
/ɹɪkɐpˈɪtʃʊlˈeɪʃən/
nounthe act of repeating the key points or parts of something in order to summarize it
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Examples
1. Basically, and this is not basic at all, recapitulation theory states that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny."
2. It consists of three essential parts: exposition, development and recapitulation.
3. The recapitulation begins at that point.
4. So it's a recapitulation of the call to praise, the imperative to praise God.
5. A sonata has three parts: the exposition, development, and recapitulation.
screed
/ˈskɹid/
nouna piece of writing or a speech that is long and boring
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Examples
1. And then today, Trump reeled off a deranged screed in a call with governors where he sounded like a cross between a brutal military dictator and a racist grandpa shuffling around the nursing home with his robe on backwards.
2. Over the weekend, Trump tweeted out an insane screed from one of his favorite Fox News hosts, Jeanine Pirro, who went after Romney on her show.
3. Well, I'm not going to call it a screed, Nancy.
4. And so it's not a screed, although there are very strong commitments on both sides.
5. The auger will then place a measured amount of the heated asphalt in front of the screed, which is a fancy name for a tool used to smooth materials.
to bowdlerize
/bˈoʊdəlɹˌaɪz/
verbto delete the sections or words that are believed to be offensive or inappropriate from a play, movie, book, etc.
Examples
to conflate
/kənˈfɫeɪt/
verbto bring ideas, texts, things, etc. together and create something new
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Examples
1. It conflates multiple aspects of the world.
2. More importantly, Marx actually conflates the relative immiseration of the proletariat with the absolute immiseration of the proletariat.
3. Now, in many zero-waste circles, the concept of zero waste and zero plastic are conflated.
4. For too long, we've conflated sexual orientation and gender identity.
5. So the writers of the show are conflating a couple of different things here.