2:00

or trampled by insistent feet at

2:03

four and five and six o'clock,

2:06

and short square fingers stuffing

2:08

pipes and evening newspapers,

2:11

and eyes assured of certain certainties,

2:15

the conscience of a blackened street impatient

2:18

to assume the world. I

2:21

am moved by fancies that are curled

2:24

around these images, and cling,

2:26

the notion of some infinitely

2:29

gentle, infinitely suffering

2:31

thing. Wipe your

2:34

hand across your mouth and

2:36

laugh, the worlds

2:38

revolve like ancient women gathering

2:41

fuel in vacant lots. You

2:45

know, sometimes you

2:47

just know you have to read a certain poem. That's

2:51

how it goes with me, and today I

2:54

just, I read the poem and I knew, okay, today

2:58

it's a T.S. Eliot day.

2:59

It just has to be. I can't explain it

3:01

any more than that, but yes, I

3:05

hope you enjoyed listening to that as much as

3:07

I enjoy reading it, so yes,

3:09

there you go. Anyway, I'm back

3:11

for my little holiday, and yes,

3:14

so this is episode 132, and I will go over the words from

3:17

episode 131.

3:22

So yes, we had probity, gradation,

3:25

dirge, and facilitate.

3:28

So probity, the quality

3:30

of having strong moral principles,

3:33

sorry, just banged my watch on the desk, so

3:36

the quality of having strong moral principles, being

3:39

honest and decent, upright,

3:42

and so forth. Gradation,

3:45

that is a scale or series of successive

3:48

changes or stages or

3:51

degrees,

3:52

a range.

3:54

Dirge, that is a lament

3:56

for the dad, like a funeral

3:59

hymn or a few funeral elegy, and

4:02

finally we had facilitate,

4:04

which is to make a process or

4:07

an action easy or easier,

4:09

to smooth something. Okay,

4:13

so now onto our new words,

4:15

and our first word for today is

4:18

slake. Slake,

4:20

spelled

4:21

S-L-A-K-E, that's

4:24

a verb. So to slake means

4:27

to quench or satisfy your

4:30

thirst. And this could

4:32

be your actual literal

4:35

thirst, so you want to drink, right?

4:37

So you want to slake your thirst for fluids.

4:40

It can also mean your

4:42

metaphorical thirst. So I

4:44

haven't seen a movie for

4:46

a long time, and I want to slake

4:49

my desire to see a movie. This

4:51

is completely, a completely fine

4:53

usage as well. And yes,

4:56

that's the only meaning for this word,

4:58

to satisfy your thirst

5:01

or satisfy your desire for something.

5:04

So you can always slake your desire

5:07

for adventure as well as your desire for

5:09

a diet coke, for example.

5:12

And some synonyms of slake are

5:15

quench, satisfy, sate,

5:18

satiate, and relieve.

5:21

And there's a quite nice etymology

5:24

here because slake comes

5:26

from old English. And I run into

5:28

this word pretty recently when I was going

5:30

over Beowulf again,

5:32

because

5:33

our hero Beowulf is actually

5:35

described as being slack in

5:38

his youth. And when I say slack,

5:40

it's the old English word slack, which

5:43

I don't know how to pronounce, right? But

5:45

in old English, slack. So

5:47

describing him as being lax, or

5:50

otherwise lacking somewhat in his younger

5:52

days. And we also

5:54

have a related Dutch word here too,

5:57

slaken, which

5:59

means to lesson or diminish

6:01

the intensity of something. So there's

6:04

Old English slack meaning lacks

6:06

or slack and the Dutch

6:09

word slarken meaning

6:11

to lessen something or diminish the

6:13

intensity of. Both of these

6:15

have a shared protodramatic

6:17

root but anyway these words

6:20

evolved to become our slake to

6:22

quench or satisfy a thirst. So

6:25

I think it is really cool now that

6:28

when you use that word, say I want to

6:30

slake my thirst, you can think in

6:33

the year 700 when people were recounting the poem

6:37

of Beowulf they were using

6:39

a word that relates directly

6:41

to this word I'm using so many

6:44

hundreds and hundreds of years later. It's just

6:47

quite cool. And

6:49

our second word today is denigrate.

6:52

Denigrate. Spelled D-E-N-I-G-R-A-T-E.

6:58

And to denigrate because it's

7:01

a verb to denigrate means

7:03

to criticize unfairly

7:06

or to disparage. So

7:09

if someone cooks a decent

7:11

meal for you and there's nothing wrong with it and

7:14

it was quite a nice meal in fact and

7:16

you say well that sucked

7:18

that was horrible and so and

7:20

so forth you're a terrible chef you're

7:24

denigrating them because this

7:26

is unfair criticism. Or

7:29

another example is someone

7:31

spreading rumors about another person

7:34

which are false in order to damage that

7:36

person's reputation.

7:38

So

7:39

they are denigrating that person.

7:41

I will add here just for clarity

7:44

that denigrate doesn't have to mean unfair

7:47

criticism. It does have this meaning

7:50

and implication but it can also just

7:52

mean in general to disparage

7:55

or to represent something as being

7:57

of little worth. So to

7:59

belittle. or to deprecate. And

8:03

I've mentioned a few synonyms already, but

8:05

we have disparage, belittle,

8:09

diminish, deprecate, or

8:12

cast aspersions on. And

8:15

our third word today is vituperative.

8:19

Vituperative spelled

8:21

V-I-T-U-P-E-R-A-T-I-V-E.

8:26

It's an adjective. And to

8:29

be vituperative means being

8:32

bitter and abusive. So

8:35

it's usually describing language

8:38

or rhetoric of some kind. So

8:40

if that was vituperative language, it

8:43

was just really strongly abusive

8:46

and bitter or acerbic

8:49

language. It actually

8:51

would work quite well with the word denigrate. So

8:54

you could say, Sarah denigrated

8:56

Adam in a vituperative way.

8:59

So she criticized Adam,

9:02

but in an especially bitter

9:04

and abusive way. And

9:07

I would say that vituperative is quite

9:09

a strong word. It's not

9:11

mild criticism. If

9:14

criticism is vituperative, it's

9:16

strong acidic criticism.

9:19

It's really cutting at someone. It's

9:21

extremely abusive and nasty.

9:24

And some synonyms of vituperative

9:27

are abusive, reproachful,

9:30

vitriolic, outrageous,

9:33

and insulting. And

9:36

we're ending on a more positive word, which

9:38

is nice, after two quite

9:40

negative words. And our final

9:42

word today is ebullient.

9:46

Ebullient spelled E-B-U-L-L-I-E-N-T.

9:52

E-B-I-E-I-E-N-T is an adjective, and

9:55

it simply means cheerful and

9:57

full of energy.

9:59

remember this word is to think bubbly

10:03

because the origin

10:05

of this word, the etymology of this word, comes

10:08

from the word for boiling

10:11

in Latin which is ebullient

10:15

in Latin boiling up. This

10:17

word made it to French too so we have

10:20

bui-en, sorry for all the

10:22

French speakers out there, but bui-en meaning

10:24

boiling in French and we

10:26

have ebullient in English.

10:29

So ebullient is related to boiling

10:32

up of water and if you imagine

10:34

someone who's really happy, really

10:37

cheerful, you can almost see

10:39

them boiling up on the inside with

10:41

this positive energy. Well

10:43

this is exactly what it means. This

10:46

is ebullient, someone who's got

10:48

a lot of energy inside, they're

10:51

cheerful, they're bubbly,

10:53

they're happy, this energy is

10:55

kind of

10:56

popping out of them in some

10:59

way.

11:00

And you could still use the word

11:02

ebullient in a poetic way, say

11:05

describing the sea, the ebullient

11:07

sea, meaning boiling and

11:10

full of energy, but mostly

11:13

ebullient does mean cheerful, full

11:15

of energy, happy, merry and so on.

11:20

And you'll mostly find it in books

11:22

these days, people don't use it much verbally,

11:25

but yes I think it's a brilliant word and

11:28

has a really nice etymology and

11:31

some synonyms are exuberant,

11:33

cheerful, buoyant, joyful,

11:37

merry and cheery.

11:39

And I suppose thinking

11:41

of merry, the hobbit

11:44

from Lord of the Rings is another good

11:46

way of thinking about someone that is

11:48

ebullient, they're always

11:50

merry, they're always full of energy.

11:54

And now on to our usual test

11:56

sentences.