Thursday Thirteen 129: Vocabulary--1984

While recently reading 1984, I noted that this book has some great vocabulary words in it. Without further ado, here are thirteen plucked out of the book to add to your roster of words. Examples of usage are taken direct from the novel.




1. anodyne (adj): relieving or lessening pain; soothing
eg: "It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant."

2. etiolate (vt): 1. to cause to be pale and unhealthy 2. to deprive of strength, weaken
eg: "Already, on the walk from the station, the May sunshine had made him feel dirty and etiolated, a creature of indoors, with the sooty dust of London in the pores of his skin."

3. persiflage (noun): 1. a light, frivolous style of writing or speaking 2. such talk or writing
eg: "When he spoke of murder, suicide, venereal disease, amputated limbs, and altered faces, it was with a faint air of persiflage."

4. spurious (adj): not true or genuine; false, counterfeit
eg: "In his capacity as administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones..."

5. diminution (noun): a diminishing or being diminished; lessening; decrease
eg: "And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty."

6. execrate (vt): 1. orig., to call down evil upon; curse 2. to speak abusively or contemptuously of; denounce scathingly 3. to loathe; detest; abhor
eg: "The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense."

7. expropriate (vt): 1. to take (land, property, etc) from its owner, esp: to take for public use or in the public interest, as by right of eminent domain 2. to transfer (property) from another to oneself 3. to deprive of ownership; dispossess
eg: "It has always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow."

8. inimical (adj): 1. like an enemy; hostile 2. in opposition; adverse; unfavorable
eg: "It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction."

9. pedant (noun): 1. a person who puts unnecessary stress on minor or trivial points of learning 2. a narrow-minded teacher who insists on exact adherence to a set of arbitrary rules (pedantic, adj)
eg: "A sort of intellectual warmth, the joy of the pedant who has found out some useless fact, shone through the dirt and scrubby hair."

10. inviolate (adj): not violated; kept sacred or unbroken
eg: "Now he had retreated a step further: in the mind he had surrendered, but he had hoped to keep the inner heart inviolate."

11. abstruse (adj): hard to understand; deep; recondite
eg: "But there were other days when they settled down to their work almost eagerly, making a tremendous show of entering up their minutes and drafting long memoranda which were never finished--when the argument as what they were supposedly arguing about grew extraordinarily involved and abstruse..."

12. sinecure (noun): any office or position providing an income or other advantage but requiring little or no work
eg: "He even had a job, a sinecure, more highly paid than his old job had been."

13. premonitory (adj): forewarning; foreboding
eg: "A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first glimpse of the cage."


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