[responsivevoice]scourge [/responsivevoice] [ skurj ] Quotation: It is a remarkable fact that smallpox, a scourge for thousands of years, has now vanished from the earth, except for two tiny vials, one locked in a highly secure facility at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, and another stored in a similarly secure vault in Siberia. […]
[responsivevoice]avowal [/responsivevoice] [ uh-vou-uh l ] Quotation: You could time a suburban story by your watch: it lasts as long as it takes a small furry animal that’s lonely to find friends, or a small furry animal that’s lost to find its parents; it lasts as long as a quick avowal of love; it lasts precisely […]
[responsivevoice]fevered [/responsivevoice] [ fee-ver ] Quotation: All humans make mistakes. But there is no room or allowance in the fevered world of conspiracy theorists for mistakes, human errors, anomalies, or plain incompetence, though the latter, from the highest levels on down, is endemic to our society. Vincent Bugliosi Social Example: Did you miss out on […]
[responsivevoice]contingent [/responsivevoice] [ kuh n-tin-juh nt ] Quotation: Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected. Charles Baudelaire Social Example: Did you miss out on reading this Word […]
Idioms are one way to empower your English language skills. Beyond upgrading the level of your sentence, they aid in making the sentence more creative, crisp and concrete. Additionally, an idiom makes the meaning more clear and explanatory. The dictionary does not carry the meanings of such phrases as it is, but they sure are […]
[responsivevoice]attune[/responsivevoice] [ uh-tyoon ] Quotation: I always choose to look, as much as one can, at the supernatural not being something that exists outside of nature, but a deeper, fundamental heart of nature that perhaps humans… have lost touch with. It’s a more primal thing than perhaps we are attuned to in our modern, self-aware […]
[responsivevoice]flagrant[/responsivevoice] [ fley-gruhnt ] Quotation: If the nose has become a deeply disillusioned and grief-stricken organ in the modern world, then what of the ear? The poor little ear – such an innocent, intelligent and sensitive creature; in these times of such flagrant sonic brutality, the sense within the ear has much to contend with. […]
[responsivevoice]subvert[/responsivevoice] [ suhb-vurt ] Quotation: I know that my tendency is to be linear, and I’m trying to find ways to subvert that. And so in ‘Bellocq’s Ophelia’ my device for subverting it was to tell the story and then to tell it again; it always circles back to this one moment, and it’s not […]
[responsivevoice]inert[/responsivevoice] [ in-urt ] Quotation: How do you make the timelessness of inert, silent objects count for something? How to use the, in a way, the dumbness of sculpture in a way that acts on us as living things? Anthony Gormley Social Example: Did you miss out on reading this Word of the Day? Catch […]
[responsivevoice]stalemate[/responsivevoice] [ steyl-meyt ] Quotation: If you look at the democratic process as a game of chess, there have to be many, many moves before you get to checkmate. And simply because you do not make any checkmate in three moves does not mean it’s a stalemate. There’s a vast difference between no checkmate and […]