S-Des
Comfortably Numb
- Joined
- Dec 8, 2005
- Posts
- 6,944
Sorry Rora, I fell asleep before the word changed. Oops.Aurora Black said:Morning! Sorry about that, I had more man clothes to wash.
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Sorry Rora, I fell asleep before the word changed. Oops.Aurora Black said:Morning! Sorry about that, I had more man clothes to wash.
S-Des said:Sorry Rora, I fell asleep before the word changed. Oops.
In fact, I'm a word nerd. I get a kick out of tossing a few odd ones intomy column, just to see if the pervicacious editors will weed them out.
-- Michael Hawley, "Things That Matter: Waiting for Linguistic Viagra", Technology Review, June, 2001
One of the most pervicacious young creatures that ever was heard of.
-- Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
The language of the bureaucrats and administrators must needs be recognized as an outgrowth of legal parlance. There is no other way to explain itspervading, pervicacious and pernicious meanderings.
-- New York Law Journal, May 27, 1909
We dined early upon stale bread and old mutton with small beer.
-- Ferdinand Mount, Jem (and Sam)
I was not born for this kind of small beer, says Joan the wife of the colonial governor, who imagines leading armies or "droves of inflamed poets."
-- Nancy Willard, "The Nameless Women of the World", New York Times, December 18, 1988
Call me a geek, but for biologists, marvels like the parasitic flatworm are on tap every day, making the reveries of Hollywood seem like small beer.
-- Jerry A. Coyne, "The Truth Is Way Out There", New York Times, October 10, 1999
AchtungNight said:People of Literotica, I have returned!
The reader who wants honestly to understand it, and not merely read into it his own ideas, needs some kind of vade mecum to provide the necessary background and explain unfamiliar words and allusions and strange turns of thought.
-- Robert C. Dentan, "Including Uz and Buz", New York Times, November 17, 1968
Roget's Thesaurus, which had come into being as a linguistic example of the Platonic ideal, became instead a vade mecum for the crossword cheat.
-- Simon Winchester, "Word Imperfect", The Atlantic, May 2001
As in the 1960s, violence converged with dynamism in American life, but unlike that subsequent period of protest, the militancy of the 1930s was restrained by the long arm of an American political tradition that favored reform by moral suasion.
-- Nona Balakian, The World of William Saroyan
He visualized a world wherein power is exercised peacefully by moral suasion and political acumen, a world of idealism in many ways.
-- George Perkovich, India's Nuclear Bomb
Some of the earliest protests of the incipient civil rights movement demanded the removal of baseball's color line. Beyond this cultural suasion, legal efforts to mandate integration were under way almost two years before Jackie Robinson donned a Brooklyn Dodger uniform.
-- Dean Chadwin, Those Damn Yankees
Even more reassuring--more wishful and escapist, from our secularist-modern perspective--is the idea that the universe is moral and hence responsive to moral suasion.
-- Yi-Fu Tuan, Escapism
Citing the construction industry, car dealers, and politicians as the purveyors of "sprawl" (a pejorative term that does not even allow for the possibility of benefits associated with low-density development), Kunstler fails to consider the role of market forces.
-- Julia Hansen, "Letter to the Editor", The Atlantic, December 1996
While he said that he is not a "fanboy," mildly pejorative slang for an aggressively obsessive "Star Wars" fan, he did mention that the John Williams "Star Wars" theme was played at his wedding reception two years ago.
-- Michel Marriott, "On a Galaxy of Sites, 'Star Wars' Fever Rises", New York Times, May 6, 1999
Welfare state is now, even for the Labour party whose grand historic achievement it was, obscurely shameful. A pejorative for our times.
-- John Sutherland, "How the potent language of civic life was undermined", The Guardian, March 20, 2001
Waugh's tetchy and combative personality made him a difficult companion at arms.
-- Penelope Lively, "A Maverick Historian", The Atlantic, February 2001
Wright was in Tokyo, busy with the Imperial Hotel, firing off telegrams blaming his son, Lloyd, and Schindler for nagging cost overruns that Barnsdall, always tetchy about parting with money, was balking at.
-- Greg Goldin, "Light Houses", Los Angeles Magazine, February 2001
His every word was pure gold then, and even the chairman, who is not known to hide his light under a bushel, got a little tetchy being asked to opine on every economic subject known to man.
-- Jamie Dettmer, "Greenspan Doesn't Always Get It Right", Insight on the News, February 26, 2001
As prams trundle and toddlers bawl, bargain-hunters try to shove, grab and kick their way to consumerist nirvana, while their spouses, weighed down by bulging bags, get seriously tetchy.
-- Kim Gilmour, "Hello, good buy", Internet Magazine, November 2001
In front of imposing edifices like the Topkapi Palace or Hagia Sophia are guides displaying Government-issued licenses. Many of these guides are erudite historians who have quit low-paying jobs as university professors and now offer private tours.
-- "What's Doing in Istanbul", New York Times, February 23, 1997
The works of Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari and Virilio are filled with seemingly erudite references to relativity, quantum mechanics, chaos theory, etc.
-- Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense
SexSweetheart said:Just wanting to say hello
George Manahan made his debut this week as music director of New York City Opera, and it is difficult to imagine someone laying claim to a major podium with less of a fanfaronade.
-- Justin Davidson, "A Director's Toil Pays Some Dividends", Newsday, September 21, 1996
But like a demure singer in a long gown who is surrounded by chorus girls in sequined miniskirts, the statue may seem slightly lost amid the fanfaronade.
-- Richard Stengel, "Rockets will glare and bands blare to celebrate the statue", Time, July 7, 1986
Thanks. I got it around Valentines day. I'm a giraffe lover and this is perfect for me. Couldn't wait until I my AV to share it with everyone.Aurora Black said:Hello! I love your AV.
Riparian is from the Latin, ripari-us + -an, from Latin ripa, the bank of a river.Riparian areas are the green, vegetated areas on each side of streams and rivers. They serve many important functions, including purifying water by removing sediments and other contaminants; reducing the risk of flooding and associated damage; reducing stream channel and streambank erosion; increasing available water and stream flow duration by holding water in stream banks and aquifers; supporting a diversity of plant and wildlife species; maintaining a habitat for healthy fish populations; providing water, forage, and shade for wildlife and livestock; and creating opportunities for recreationists to fish, camp, picnic, and enjoy other activities.
-- Jeremy M. Brodie, "Ribbons of Green", Bureau of Land Management Environmental Education Home Page
Along its serpentine course, the Charles River widens and narrows, and its riparian sounds swell to crescendos in places or relax to the low purr of a river at peace.
-- Craig Lambert, Mind Over Water: Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing
[The vireo's] comeback may prove that habitat along streams in Southern California is recovering from the effects of pollution caused by decades of urban development. That is a critical indicator of environmental health in a state that has lost 97% of its riparian woodlands, more than any other state.
-- Gary Polakovic, "Songbird's Numbers Crescendo", Los Angeles Times, August 22, 1999
[What about your social circle?] "A steady stream of brilliant American intellectuals visiting me in the riparian solitude of a beautifully reflected sunset."
-- Vladimir Nabokov, "Nabokov on Nabokov and Things", New York Times, May 12, 1968
inhere \in-HIR\, intransitive verb:
To be inherent; to belong, as attributes or qualities.
The authority that belongs to someone as former secretary of state does not inhere in the person, but in the relation between the person and his former office.
-- "The grim face of partisanship", Washington Times, July 10, 2001
To other critics, the problems of democracy inhere in the incapacity of democratic institutions.
-- John Mark Hansen, "Individuals, institutions, and public preferences over public finance", American Political Science Review, September 1998
For New Labour has decided that upon these anonymous, nondescript, utterly unqualified public functionaries is to be thrust the full weight of moral and social authority that once inhered in the anointed clergy.
-- Janet Daley, "Will you kindly admit me into your bedroom", Daily Telegraph, October 20, 1998
staid \STAYD\, adjective:
Steady or sedate in character; sober; composed; regular; not wild, volatile, or fanciful.
After the founders have left or died, after the excitement has moved elsewhere along with the best employees, after the company's products and logo and image have grown synonymous with staid and predictable.
-- Michael S. Malone, Infinite Loop
His mother being, in fact, a rather staid English country lady of mild habits and genteel aspirations.
-- Lesley Hazleton, Driving To Detroit
He took no interest in artistic pursuits, and in time became a staid businessman like his father -- a bank manager; in fact, utterly middle class.
-- Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast
Commodious derives from the Latin commodus, "conforming to measure, hence convenient or fit for a particular purpose," from com-, "with" + modus, "measure."Then there are the trousers, black check or blue check, with commodious pockets.
-- Richard F. Shepard, "For Caring Chefs, Crowning Glory Is the Headgear", New York Times, August 15, 1990
This brought John to accept Benjamin Franklin's invitation to reside in his commodious quarters in Passy, a suburb at the city's edge.
-- Paul C. Nagel, John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, a Private Life
Fed by the melting ice packs, the ocean rose again, inundating coastal lowlands and pouring back through the Narrows, creating the commodious Upper Bay that would serve as the harbor of New York.
-- Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
Elizabeth's husband . . . had been a reckless, improvident man, who left many debts behind him when he died suddenly of a consumption in September 1704.
-- David Nokes, Jane Austen: A Life
Lily is spoiled, pleasure-loving, and has one of those society mothers who are as improvident as a tornado.
-- Elizabeth Hardwick, Sight-Readings: American Fictions
He called the decision "an exercise in raw judicial power" that was "improvident and extravagant."
-- Linda Greenhouse, "White Announces He'll Step Down From High Court", New York Times, March 20, 1993
Niagara is no virgin. Today, its cataract can be stopped with the pull of a lever, and less than half its natural flow pours over the precipice.
-- Thurston Clarke, "Roll Out the Barrel", New York Times, February 16, 1997
Bartram was an ace self-dramatizer and avid explorer of nature, whose journals are full of blood and thunder and such dramatic observations of animals as this one of the American crocodile: "His enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils."
-- Diane Ackerman, "Nature Writers: A Species Unto Themselves", New York Times, May 13, 1990
So ambitious is he to detail the full background of every individual, group, institution or phenomenon that figures in his chronicle . . . that a reader sometimes founders in the cataract of details.
-- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Common Ground, by J. Anthony Lukasm, New York Times, September 12, 1985