Wordnik - Pocket Posh Word Power: 120 Words to Make You Sound Intelligent

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Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC
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E-ISBN: 978-1-4494-0887-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2010934822

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Project Editor: Angela Tung

Illustration by Heather Bailey

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preface

In this book, you will find 120 words that (properly deployed) will make you sound intelligent. Of course, they wont make you sound intelligent in every situation (theres really no word that will make you sound intelligent if youre dressed in a hot-pink chicken suit, for instance), but being able to pull out words such as avuncular, gloaming, and louche in the right contexts will go a long way toward impressingor at least distractingyour listeners.

The key to sounding intelligent, however, is to ensure that you are using these words correctly. To that end, weve provided here not only dictionary definitions, but also pronunciations, example sentences from sources both classic and modern, and helpful notes that give the background on a words history, use, or related synonymsnearly everything youll need to increase the number of erudite and evocative words in your vocabulary.

Be aware that, in some instances, not using these words will make you sound more intelligent than pulling them out where theyre not wanted. Once you learn them, though, youll be able to make that call!

abstemious

adjective

1. Promoting or favoring abstinence; associated with temperance.
2. Devoted to or spent in abstinence: as, an abstemious life.
3. Sparing in diet; moderate in the use of food and drink; temperate; abstinent.
4. Restricted; very moderate and plain; very sparing; spare: opposed to luxurious or rich: as, an abstemious diet.
   

Examples:

Scrooges abstemious gruel-eating lifestyle might have been applauded as a sign of godliness back in the days of the early bread-and-water saintly ascetic hermits, who lived in caves and said Bah! Humbug! to all comers. Margaret Atwood, Debtors Prison, The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2008

Although wet (in both the drinking and political senses) [British Prime Minister David Cameron] is not a rampaging drunk. He will not produce a hip flask of gin, as our Prince Charles and his wife did when they visited the abstemious George W. Bushes at HQ a few years ago, glugging back a couple of stiff ones before walking into dinner. Quentin Letts, Everything You Always Wanted to Know about David Cameron, Forbes, July 20, 2010

But Joe (so abstemious, so shy) was in a million parlorsbig as Life, the new magazine that debuted the same year as he. The Dimaggio Nobody Knew, Newsweek, March 22, 1999

Abstemious is formed by the Latin ab, away, and temum, liquor.

abstruse

adjective

1. Remote from comprehension; difficult to apprehend or understand; profound; occult; esoteric: opposed to obvious.
2. Withdrawn from view; out of the way; concealed.
   

Examples:

He sought refuge from his own sensitive nature in abstruse meditations, and delighted most in those subjects requiring the full exercise of his intellectual powers, which never seemed fatiguedand in his early life never did sun shine on a more joyous being! James Gillman, The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1838

The active labors of the day are closed with preparation for the court business of the following morning; and then instead of retiring to rest, as ordinary men would, after such exertions, he spends the night in abstruse study, or in social intercourse. Lord Brougham, International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, October 1, 1850

Call me a philistine, he said, as they strolled through the museum, but most contemporary art is too abstruse for me to understand. Wordnik

Abstruse is not to be confused with obtuse, dull; lacking in acuteness or sensibility; blunt.

acedia

noun

1. Apathy; a lack of care or interest; indifference.
2. An abnormal mental condition, characterized by carelessness, listlessness, fatigue, and want of interest in affairs.
   

Examples:

While true depression has clinical causes that need treatment, acedia is essentially a spiritual problem, a wrestling with ones own soul and the meaning of life. Cary McMullen, A condition with no name finds one, Tuscaloosa News, March 28, 2009

Cassian himself dwells on the horrible liability of the monks to the principal vices which infest human naturegluttony, uncleanness, avarice, anger, vainglory, prideabove all, that despairing and unaccountable melancholy which they call acedia, and describe as the demon that walketh in the noonday. Frederic William Farrar, Gathering Clouds: A Tale of the Days of St. Chrysostom, 1895

We have to sweep our souls clean of feelings of unworthiness and self-righteousness and rid our spirits of the cobwebs of acedia. Harriet Rossetto, Barack Obama and the God of Love, The Huffington Post, November 24, 2008

And a rather relentless mention of missed opportunities, friends lost or gone wrong, dryness, acedia, hopeless suffering, stiffening mental jointsToday we stalk/in the raging desert of our thought/whose single drop of mercy is/each knows the other there. R. W. Flint, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, February 1, 1963

Acedia may be used interchangeably with sloth, slowness, tardiness, laziness, and is one of the seven deadly sins.

adduce