Vocabulary

Meaning:

Adj.

• Deliberately cruel or violent.
• Immoral.

Example:

This could be due to the vicious cycle of new initiatives and trainings and workshops (and money invested), which then fall into the same trap.

Meaning:

Adj.

• Not candid or sincere, typically by pretending one know less about something than one really does.

Example:

As a leader it would be disingenuous if you only claimed to make people better through support.

Meaning:

Verb.

• Discharge (smell or moisture) slowly and steadily.
• (of a person) display (an emotion or quality) strongly and openly.

Example:

You could sense the power of Bill’s strengths as soon as you entered his room: there was a buzz, an urgency, that exuded from the smallest actions of the most challenged students, and the power of these things trounced the times when Bill had to ask a student to go make a copy for him.

Meaning:

Verb.

• Express great regret, disappointment, or bitterness over (something).

Example:

It’s easy, they note, to bewail what’s wrong rather than see the power of what’s right.

Meaning:

Adj.

• Remarkably or impressively great in extent, size, or degree.
• Unnatural or abnormal.

Example:

Perhaps we assume that for Messi practice means playing games of soccer over and over—scrimmaging, in short—so that he applies his prodigious skill to anticipate the game in all of its complexity; yet, in this photo, it is a drill he is working on, one that isolates some small aspect of his game so he can intentionally improve it.

Meaning:

Adj.

• highly destructive or damaging.
• causing severe shock, distress, or grief.
• (Informal) extremely impressive, effective, or attractive

Example:

In a game, he would suddenly flout deeply rooted expectations about what to do in a certain situation and do something entirely unexpected—with devastating effect.

Meaning:

Adj.

• openly disregard (a rule, law, or convention).

Example:

In a game, he would suddenly flout deeply rooted expectations about what to do in a certain situation and do something entirely unexpected—with devastating effect.

Meaning:

Noun.

• mental calmness, composure, and evenness in temper, especially in a difficult situation.

Example:

Once they were able to do this with equanimity, it would both limit patient agitation and increase the processing capacity doctors had to listen to and assess their patients.

Meaning:

Noun.

• a peculiar behavioral habit.

Example:

It is not a quirk of survival but a necessity that, speeding down the highway, your foot moves to the brake pedal well before your conscious brain has time to get involved in analyzing the decision.

Meaning:

Adj/Noun.

• of vital important; crucial.
• giving an authoritative command.
• an essential or urgent thing

Example:

For people who perform for a living, the imperative of training the mind to execute unconsciously is also strong.

Meaning:

Verb.

• spoil the attractiveness of

Example:

This is how Resistance disfigures love.

Meaning:

Adj.

• magnificient, very impresssive
• (informal) excellent, very good

Example:

Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

Meaning:

Adj.

• having a harmful effect, especially in a gradual and subtle way.

Example:

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit.

But it’s the most pernicious species of myth to set before the awakening writer, because it seduces him into believing he can pull off the big score without pain and without persistence.

Meaning:

Verb.

• take (drink, food, or other substance) into the body by swallowing it or absorbing it.

Example:

Do you regularly ingest any substance, controlled or otherwise, whose aim is the alleviation of depression, anxiety, etc.?

Meaning:

Adj.

• incapable of making mistake or being wrong.
• never failing, always effective

Example:

Resistance is infallible.

Meaning:

Adj.

• proceeding in a gradual, subtle way, but with harmful effects
• Treacherous, crafty

Example:

Resistance if insidious.

Meaning:

Verb.

• make (someone) less angry or hostile.

Example:

They attempted to placate the students with promises.

Meaning:

Verb.

• control and make use of (natural resources), especially to produce energy.

Example:

She harnesses the urge for trouble in her work.

Meaning:

Verb.

• go or move back or further away from a previous position.
• (of a quality, feeling, or possibility) gradually diminish

Example:

My bitching self is receding now.

Meaning:

Adj. 

• incapable of producing any useful result, pointless

Example:

To defy their will is futile.

Meaning:

Verb.

• To feel, to explore by touch.

Example:

One of the functions of language is to help us palp them—to help us extract and remember the important features of our experiences so that we can analyze and communicate them later.

Meaning:

noun. 

• unlikely chance occurrence, especially a surprising piece of luck.

Example:

Such an existence is so difficult for most of us to imagine, so alien to our normal experience, that we are tempted to dismiss it as a fluke—an unfortunate, rare, and freakish aberration brought on by traumatic head injury.

Meaning:

Verb.

• ask questions of (someone, especially a suspect or a prisoner) closely, aggressively, or formally.

Example:

Whatever you imagined, it’s a pretty good bet that when I said spaghetti, you did not have an unrequited urge to interrogate me about the nuances of sauce and locale before envisioning a single noodle.

Meaning:

Adjective. 

• most noticeable or important.

Example:

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that the gritty details of babysitting that are so salient to us as we execute them were not part of our mental image of babysitting when we imagined it a month earlier, but what is surprising is how surprised we are when those details finally come into view.

Meaning:

Noun.

• a bold manner or a show of boldness intended to impress or intimidate.

Example:

Fischer’s and Eastman’s reactions to their respective situations seem so contrary, so completely inverted, that one is tempted to chalk them up to false bravado or mental abberration.

Meaning:

Noun.

• a departure from what is normal, usual, or expected, typically one that is unwelcome.

Example:

Fischer’s and Eastman’s reactions to their respective situations seem so contrary, so completely inverted, that one is tempted to chalk them up to false bravado or mental abberration.

Meaning:

Verb.

• Destroy completely.
• Kill (a pest).

Example:

Fortunately, his dreams of equity in the American workplace were not so easily exterminated.

Meaning:

Noun.

• A mark stamped on articles of gold, silver, or platinum in Britain, certifying their standard of purity.

Example:

One of the hallmarks of a visual experience is that we can almost always tell whether it is the product of a real or an imagined object.

Meaning:

Adjective.

• Present, appearing, or found everywhere.

Example:

But while these automatic, continuous, nonconscious predictions of the immediate, local, personal future are both amazing and ubiquitous, they are not the sorts of predictions that got our species out of the trees and into dress slacks.

Meaning:

Adjective.

• Likely or liable to be influenced or harmed by a particular thing.
• Capable or admitting of.

Example:

I take small comfort in the fact that other pigs seem susceptible to precisely the same delusion.

Meaning:

Noun.

• An idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder.

Example:

I take small comfort in the fact that other pigs seem susceptible to precisely the same delusion.

Meaning:

Adjective.

• (of an idea/suggestion) wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate.
• (of a person or a person's behavior or actions) foolish; unreasonable.
• (of an object or situation) arousing amusement or derision; ridiculous.

Example:

I suppose I knew that my vow was absurd even as I made it, and yet, some part of me seemed sincerely to believe that chewing and swallowing were nasty habits that I could easily renounce, if only because the torpid mass that was winding its way through my digestive tract at the approximate speed of continental drift would supply all my nutritional, intellectual, and spiritual needs forevermore.

Meaning:

Verb.

• Formally declare one's abandonment of (a claim, right, or possession).
• Refuse to recognize or abide by any longer.
• Declare that one will no longer engage in or support.

Example:

I suppose I knew that my vow was absurd even as I made it, and yet, some part of me seemed sincerely to believe that chewing and swallowing were nasty habits that I could easily renounce, if only because the torpid mass that was winding its way through my digestive tract at the approximate speed of continental drift would supply all my nutritional, intellectual, and spiritual needs forevermore.

Meaning:

Noun.

• lack of contentment; dissatisfaction with one's circumstances.

Example:

popular discontent with the system had been general for several years

Meaning:

Adjective.

• foolish, stupid

Example:

We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor’s witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become.

Meaning:

Adjective.

• of or relating to the assistance of those in need.

Example:

We go easy on the lard and tobacco, smile dutifully at yet another of our supervisor’s witless jokes, read books like this one when we could be wearing paper hats and eating pistachio macaroons in the bathtub, and we do each of these things in the charitable service of the people we will soon become.

Meaning:

Verb.

• work extremely hard or incessantly.

Example:

We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that.

Meaning:

Adjective.

• having or showing sharp powers of judgment; astute.

Example:

The three-and-a-half-pound meat loaf between our ears is not a simple recording device but a remarkably smart computer that gathers information, makes shrewd judgments and even shrewder guesses, and offers us its best interpretation of the way things are.

Meaning:

Verb.

• yearn to possess or have (something).

Example:

As we have seen, we can’t do that with the kind of precision that scientists covet.