Source: http://www.victoriamiguel.com/dictionary.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 18:23:25+00:00

Document:
A wonderful man by the name of Mr Brown taught me Latin and Ancient Greek. I remember the enthusiasm with which he related the possibility of saying “I am dead” in Ancient Greek; although grammatically proper, it is utterly useless outside of the theatre.
conj. Used to connect words, phrases, or clauses that have the same grammatical function in a construction.
And is one of my favourite everyday words. I am given to understand that sentences should never begin with and because it creates a sentence fragment.
adj. Morally bad or wrong, wicked.
What was once used to express an unequivocal catholic truth is now a relative term subject to individual belief systems. John Locke believed that we should have a clear understanding of what we mean to convey by moral words prior to using them in conversation. When the American editor of Roget’s Thesaurus removed the words ‘fugue’ and ‘aria,’ lest they corrupt the American public, he ruined the book by the misapplication of evil.
To mock death: after Noël Coward.
n. The amount of land one man can work in one day.
Currently used to designate a unit of land, but originally it delineated the amount of land one man can work in a day; acre describes the evolution from what we can do to what we can have.
I once played a dictionary game. I don’t like games, but I love dictionaries. When my turn came I had already decided upon fairlec; unfortunately the word on which the game hinged had to be in the dictionary provided. I am still waiting for an opportunity to use fairlec.
n. Harshness of manner; ill temper or irritability.
When applied to a person asperity combines a roughness of surface and sound. It can also be used to describe either a roughness of sound or surface.
​Necessary, but inadequate: after Heidegger.
n. Middle English. A person of low status, scoundrel, lecher.
adj. Incisive or keen, as language or a person; caustic; cutting; trenchant wit.
adj. Marked by conciseness, precision, or refinement of expression.
Precision, which depends on two minds understanding exactly the same thing, causes the corrosion of both concision and refinement.
adj. (Scots) Dreary, dull, bleak.
Dreich is usually used onomatopoeically to describe weather: a particularly insidious kind of rain common in Scotland.
v. To boast or brag; to use boastful, bragging, or vainglorious language.
The scientist, James Clerk Maxwell, was sad to discover that Dr Johnson had left ‘molecule’ out of his dictionary.
Can describe a proximity in space, kinship, nature, or time, but propinquity is always subject to time, whether temporal or eternal.
adj. Presenting favourable circumstances; auspicious.
The perfidious desire to know.
n. The concluding part of a discourse and especially an oration.
The most perilous of all endgames.
A dear friend once told me that his mother had assured him that he need never be afraid of a word he did not know, since most of them could be deciphered logically. Pulchritude defies a mother’s comfort.
adj. Being in agreement or accord.
v. To prove to be false or erroneous, as an opinion or charge.
Disprove, contest, rebut; counter, repudiate, negate; contradict: proof that synonyms are not synonymous.
v. To induce (a person) to commit an unlawful or evil act.
1. v. trans. To bribe, induce, or procure (a person) by underhand or unlawful means to commit a misdeed.
2.a v. spec. To bribe or unlawfully procure (a person) to make accusations or give evidence; to induce to give false testimony or to commit perjury. Also, to procure (evidence) by such unlawful means.
2.b v. To procure the performance or execution of (a thing) by bribery or other corrupt means.
3. v. To prepare provide or procure, esp. in a secret, stealthy, or underhand manner. Obs.
4. v. To furnish, equip, adorn. Obs.
5. v. To give support to, aid, assist. Obs.
6. v. To introduce or bring to one’s aid with a sinister motive. Obs.
v. To reject as having no authority or binding force: to repudiate a claim.
Synonyms are not synonymous. Cf. refute.
adj. Utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute.
Wild (13..); desolate (c1386); unthrift (1388); riotous (c1405); resolute (1475); palliard (1484); dissolute (1513); royetous (1526); rakehell (1556); dissolutious (1560); sluttish (1575); rakehelly (1579); low (1599); lavish (1600); rakelly (c1600); profligate (1627); profligated (1652); rantipole (1660); abandoned (1692); raking (1696); rakish (1696); dissipated (1744); dissipating (1818); outward (1875). The HTOED.
adj. Diligent in application or attention; persevering; assiduous.
adv. Thwarted in hope, desire, or expectation.
un’quenchable adj. – incapable of being quenched; inextinguishable.
adj. Admitting the passage of light; transparent or translucent.
adj. Transparently clear in style or meaning.
Newton separated colours using a prism, showing that white was the combination of all of the colours of the spectrum.
You meet all mysteries of philosophy.” – Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty: translator of Rabelais, and author of the Logopandecteision.
v. (Scots) To walk with a limp, to drag a limb, to walk lamely; to move with a gait somewhere between walking and crawling.
Pronunciation: [h – ur – p – (e) – l]: h as in hot, inhale (main stress); ur as in burn; p as in pine; e as in beaten; l as in leap, hill.
In literature: saga. A story, popularly believed to be matter of fact, which has been developed by gradual accretions in the course of ages, and has been handed down by oral tradition.
v. To give a sketchy outline of.
v. To overshadow; to shade, obscure.
Adumbrate is derived from the Latin ‘umbra,’ meaning shadow, from which ‘umbrella’ also descends; like the umbrella, it gives shape, collects, and protects.
tr. v. To confine within or as if within walls; imprison.
n. Deceitfulness, untrustworthiness; breach of faith or of promise; betrayal of trust; treachery.
The difference between perfidy and treachery is the difference between word and deed: perfidy persuades and treachery betrays.
adj. Lacking authenticity or validity in essence or origin.
Hamlet: Act 1; Scene 5; Lines 166 – 167: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
adj. A song or verses of a licentious or scurrilous character. Obs.
From the Latin, pertaining to Fescennia of Etruria, a town famous for its licentious and scurrilous poetry. Fescennine verse was an early type of Italian poetry from which satire is said to have developed.
n. Connect or link in a series or chain.
n. Spiritual torpor and apathy.
The fourth century monk, Evagrius, who listed acedia as one of his eight evil thoughts or temptations, referred to acedia as the ‘dameon qui etiam meridianus vocatur:’ the noonday demon. This list was the basis of Pope Gregory the Great’s Seven Deadly Sins. Gregory combined acedia (discouragement) with tristitia (sorrow) to form sloth, and added envy.
adj. Given to excessive and often trivial or rambling talk.
One of the ignominious traits of Mrs Bennet.
First recorded usage by Richard Sheldon in his “A Survey of the Miracles of the Church of Rome, proving them to be Antichristian” of 1616.
n. Reconciliation or fusing of different systems of belief especially when success is partial or the result is heterogeneous.
Adj. and n. Not jovial, being one who does not laugh.
Sir Isaac Newton was agelastic. He is said to have laughed only once when someone asked him the value of studying Euclid.
adj. Of or relating to the ‘quiddity’ or essence of a person or thing, essential.
Hamlet: Act 2; Scene 2; Lines 303 – 318: “I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why, it appeareth nothing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights me not; nor woman neither, […]” Cf. Spurious.
adj. Having a harmful effect; injurious.
From the Latin verb exigo: I drive out; I demand, require, enforce (exact pay); I measure (against a standard), weigh; I examine, test, determine. Cf. the birth of geometry.
adj. Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration.
Applied by Kant to a proposition enouncing a necessary, and hence absolute, truth; the ‘Dei’ are apodeictic from the practical, moral point of view. Kant distinguished the apodeictic from the problematic and the assertoric.
adj. Necessarily or demonstrably true. Beyond dispute.
adj. Of a grave and solemn countenance, or of a heavy and sad look.
I adopted ‘vultuous’ from the Oxford English Dictionaries’ ‘Save the Words’ campaign on the 9th of September 2009.
n. An empty space or a missing part; a gap.
Language is the vehicle, ‘the great conduit,’ by which telementation takes place.
From John Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” of 1690 in which he details the imperfections of language; the failure of telementation through obfuscation or the abuse of words, and the means of remedying these faults and deceptions by the use of definition, explanation, and illustration.
adj. Causing or tending to cause sleep.
A treacherous beguilement of the noonday demon.
Disapprobation and opprobrium: moral words of which the full weight is only felt when enunciated by Stephen Fry as Jeeves.
adj. Dependent on chance, luck, or uncertain outcome.
This is one of the words I inherited from John Cage. I was first introduced to his music during an Art History Lecture at the University of Edinburgh: that was also a happy accident.
n. Gracefulness of style, expression of an unpleasant thing in an agreeable manner.
“If god didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” – Voltaire. Cf. Salimbene di Adam’s “Chronicles” describing the ‘forbidden experiment’ of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II.
n. A direction that the voice or instrument is to be silent for a time.
L. tacere, tacitus. Tace (Latin imperative): Be Still! Tacet in music. Tacit, taciturn, taciturnity. A misnomer for the author and orator Tacitus despite the enormous lacunae in the texts of his that survive.
n. A fanciful decoration, ornament or contraption.
n. A whim, fanciful idea, fad.
v. To make weary by being dull, repetitive, tedious.
adj. Belonging to the Lowlands of Scotland.
James Murray, the lallan editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.
v. tr. To arrange so that they overlap.
To the horizontal as immure is to the vertical.
v. To roam or wander aimlessly.
Dr Johnson’s sobriquet without his sense of purpose.
n. An air of compelling charm, romance, and excitement, especially when delusively alluring.
Originally a Scots word; it was introduced into the literary language by Sir Walter Scott. Etymologically, glamour is said to be a corrupt form of grammar.
n. A chorus of a poem or song; a repeated saying.
Learn young, learn fair; learn old, learn mair.
adj. (Scots) ‘Crabbed, irritable, peevish’ (Jamieson); slightly affected in the head by drinking, muddle-headed, wrong-headed.
“Fergusson uses this term when giving a pretty just picture of the general prevalence of dissipation in Edinburgh at the New Year.” – Jamieson’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language, 1808.
​“We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation” – Voltaire.
Given to excessive or incessant laughter.
Abderian is the opposite of agelastic: we ought to have words for degrees of laughter between the two extremes.
n. A person who hates tobacco smoke.
adj. Of or pertaining to chess.
adj. Of or relating to the belief that God can be known only in terms of what He is not.
Necessary, but inadequate: after Heidegger. Cf. Charientism.
n. a Second-rate imitator or follower, especially of an artist or philosopher.
Standing on the shoulders of giants: talent borrows, genius steals.
n. Inability to interpret sensations and thus recognise things.
Freud’s term for the loss of perception. According to Bishop Berkley ‘to be is to be perceived:’ physical objects exist only when a subject equipped with sense organs perceives them. The inability to perceive oneself thus poses a threat to existence. Cf. Cogito ergo sum.
n. A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry, weather in certain regions.
Blood from a stone: from the Greek, ‘petro’ meaning rock, and ‘ichor,’ the ethereal fluid supposed to flow like blood in the veins of the gods.

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