Week 14 Hoag - "avarice"

 (n.) excessive or insatiable desire for wealth or gain

"Public and private avarice make the air we breathe fat" (Emerson 6).

I found this word in the excerpt of "the American Scholar". I chose this word for the word of the week because it makes the message of this sentence, and the section of the reading, so much more meaningful. Emerson is saying that people's want for money is what makes America so corrupt, and if I had ignored the word "avarice" I wouldn't have known the meaning of the sentence.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 6- Frazee Neuromodulation

 Word:  neuromodulation POS: noun Definition: the alteration of nerve activity through targeted delivery of a stimulus, such as electrical stimulation or chemical agents, to specific neurological sites in the body Location Found: “ the huge breadth of the field allows biomedical engineers to develop specialties in an area that interests them, be it biomaterials, neuromodulation devices, orthopaedic repair, or even stem cell engineering.” I was reaching Biomedical Engineering and this was in the article.  Reason for choosing: I choose this word because I was interested in the meaning behind it, and wanted to better understand what they were talking about. I will always be curious and researching about what I would like to be is interesting and fun, finding new words and topics along the way is a bonus.
Read more

Week 10 Cady - Thunderloft

Thunderloft:  (n.) a thundercloud “...your forehead resembles what, in some very astonishing poetry, I once saw styled, ‘a blue-piled thunderloft’” (Bronte 399). This is from the novel, Jane Eyre . So originally when I first looked up this word, I c ould not find a concrete definition for it. To be honest, this is not uncommon for words from Jane Eyre because it uses many archaic vocabulary that is not still in use today. Thus, I decided to dig deeper. Upon further researching, I found that ‘a blue-piled thunderloft’ is actually a quote from a poem, "The Demoniac: A Poem In Seven Chapters" by Thomas Aird. "The Demoniac" is a tale of a women begging Jesus to help find her lost son. This poem came from a magazine that was published around when Jane Eyre was being written. Even upon finding this poem, there still was no real definition for thunderloft. People mostly believe that it means thundercloud because loft can mean cloud, but the whole thing is still up fo...
Read more

Week 7 Greene “inertia”

 Inertia: noun A property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force. “The direction is a matter of inertia without friction.” Physics Class  I chose this word for a few reasons one of which is that it sounds cool. The other reason is I felt like I was paying a lot more attention in class because I was listening for words I don’t know. 
Read more