Vocabulary #5

acumen - noun a tapering point; shrewdness shown by keen insight

• My acumen was needed for the discussion to continue.

adjudicate - verb bring to an end; settle conclusively; put on trial or hear a case and sit as the judge at the trial of

• All I see on Facebook are statuses about how teenage girls want to adjudicate heart brake from their lives.

anachronism - noun an artifact that belongs to another time; a person who seems to be displaced in time; who belongs to another age; something located at a time when it could not have existed or occurred

• In a century my iPod will the an anachronism of the 21st century.

apocryphal - adj. being of questionable authenticity; of or belonging to the Apocrypha

• The gold watch that my mother found on the ground was apocryphal.

disparity - noun inequality or difference in some respect

• Younger siblings are always treated with disparity.

dissimulate - verb hide (feelings) from other people

• Teenage girls tend to say that they are dissimulating from society.

empirical - adj. derived from experiment and observation rather than theory; relying on medical quackery

• The empirical data from the chemistry lab was disappointing.

flamboyant - adj. richly and brilliantly colorful; elaborately or excessively ornamented; noun showy tropical tree or shrub native to Madagascar; widely planted in tropical regions for its immense racemes of scarlet and orange flowers; sometimes placed in genus Poinciana

• Flamboyant backgrounds are usually very appealing to art critics.

fulsome - adj. unpleasantly and excessively suave or ingratiating in manner or speech

• The fulsome man looked very shady and untrustworthy.

immolate - verb offer as a sacrifice by killing or by giving up to destruction

• In polytheistic societies, immolation was popular for their religion.

imperceptible - adj. impossible or difficult to perceive by the mind or senses

• The wild painting was very imperceptible.

lackey - noun a male servant (especially a footman); a person who tries to please someone in order to gain a personal advantage

• High school is known for their amount of lackeys. 

liaison - noun a channel for communication between groups; a usually secretive or illicit sexual relationship

• I serve as a liaison for many organizations in the world.

monolithic - adj. characterized by massiveness and rigidity and total uniformity; imposing in size or bulk or solidity.

•  The monolithic marching band impressed the whole audience.

mot juste - noun the approprite word or expression

• Sometimes the mot juste of everyday speech never comes to mind.

nihilism - noun a revolutionary doctrine that advocates destruction of the social system for its own sake; complete denial of all established authority and institutions; the delusion that things (or everything, including the self) do not exist; a sense that everything is unreal

• The failure of a society called for the complete nihilism of the nation.

patrician - adj. of the hereditary aristocracy or ruling class of ancient Rome or medieval Europe; of honorary nobility in the Byzantine empire; belonging to or characteristic of the nobility or aristocracy; noun a person of refined upbringing and manners; a member of the aristocracy

•  Patricians were treated with so much honor in the past, but it seems like that has died down since the rise of democracy.

propitiate - verb make peace with

• After an argument with a friend, we always propitiate to ensure that we don't lose each other.

sic - adv. intentionally so written (used after a printed word or phrase); verb urge a dog to attack someone

• Getting sicced by a dog is a trite idea used by many children.

sublimate - adj. made pure; noun the product of vaporization of a solid; verb direct energy or urges into useful activities; vaporize and then condense right back again; change or cause to change directly from a solid into a vapor without first melting; remove impurities from, increase the concentration of, and separate through the process of distillation; make more subtle or refined

• I have completely forgotten the process of sublimination that we learned about in Chemistry last year.