approbation
\ap-ruh-BAY-shuhn\
noun;
Meaning :
- 1. The act of approving; formal or official approval.
- 2. Praise; commendation.
USAGE EXAMPLE 1 :
1. The speech struck a responsive chord among many and won him much approbation.
-- George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed
2. More importantly, these drawings represented a first success, which brought the intoxicating rewards ofapprobation and cash.
-- Matthew Sturgis, Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography
3. To some of his contemporaries, the episode seemed more the schemings of someone craving attention and the approbation of his peers than an act of sabotage.
-- Richard Siklos, Shades of Black
vitiate
\VISH-ee-ayt\
transitive verb;
Meaning :
- 1. To make faulty or imperfect; to render defective; to impair; as, "exaggeration vitiates a style of writing."
- 2.To corrupt morally; to debase.
- 3. To render ineffective; as, "fraud vitiates a contract."
USAGE EXAMPLE 1 :
1. MacNelly is one of the few contemporary political cartoonists who can use humor to accentuate, notvitiate, his points.
-- Richard E. Marschall, "The Century In Political Cartoons", Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 1999
2. Whatever a "real contradiction" might be, "apparent contradictions" are quite sufficient to vitiate a doctrine of biblical authority that is based on the supposedly apparent reading of the text.
-- Robert M. Price, "The Psychology of Biblicism", Humanist, May 2001
tarradiddle
\tair-uh-DID-uhl\
noun;
also taradiddle
Meaning :
- 1. A petty falsehood; a fib.
- 2. Pretentious nonsense.
USAGE EXAMPLE 1 :
1. Oh please! Even in the parallel universe, tarradiddlesof this magnitude cannot go unchallenged.
-- "Taxation in the parallel universe", Sunday Business, June 11, 2000
2. Mr B did not tell a whopper. This was no fib, plumper, porker or tarradiddle. There was definitely no deceit, mendacity or fabrication.
-- "Looking back", Western Mail, May 11, 2002
coquetry
\KOH-ki-tree; koh-KE-tree\
noun;
Meaning :
- 1. Dalliance; flirtation.
USAGE EXAMPLE 1 :
1. 'You were probably very bored by it,' he said, catching at once, in mid-air, this ball of coquetrythat she had thrown to him.
-- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
2. Her pose, quite natural for a woman of the East, might perhaps in a Frenchwoman, have suggested a slightly affected coquetry.
-- Alexandre Dumas père, The Count of Monte Cristo
quietus
\kwy-EE-tuhs\
noun;
Meaning :
- 1. Final discharge or acquittance, as from debt or obligation.
- 2. Removal from activity; rest; death.
- 3. Something that serves to suppress or quiet.
USAGE EXAMPLE 1 :
1. I have put a quietus upon that ticking. Depend upon it, the ticking will trouble you no more.
-- Herman Melville, "The Apple-Tree Table",
2. Consider a small police-blotter report from an 1875 issue of The Grant County Herald in Silver City, N[ew] M[exico]: "We learn that on Friday, Jose Garcia, who lives at the Chino copper mines, caught his wife in flagrante delicto -- we leave the reader to guess the crime -- Jose, then and there, gave her the quietuswith an axe."
-- Thomas Kunkel, "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Six-Shooter", New York Times, August 30, 1998
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