SKIP TO CONTENT

Ten Words from Today's NY Times - June 20, 2012

Ripped from the headlines! See full stories here: Mubarak Said to Be in Critical Condition in Egypt Hospital, Public Workers Face Continued Layoffs, Hurting the Recovery, In Art, Freedom of Expression Doesn’t Extend to ‘Is It Real?’.
10 words 57 learners

Learn words with Flashcards and other activities

Full list of words from this list:

  1. deteriorate
    become worse or disintegrate
    CAIRO — Former President Hosni Mubarak’s health deteriorated rapidly and he was rushed to a military hospital on Tuesday.
  2. wield
    handle effectively
    In recent days, the generals had moved to seize the kind of uncontested authority that the former president wielded during his nearly three decades in power.
  3. volatility
    the quality of being unpredictable and affected by emotion
    The confusion over his health injected new volatility into the country’s growing political and constitutional crisis.
  4. notorious
    known widely and usually unfavorably
    His health had also declined rapidly after his sentencing, when he was flown by helicopter from the courthouse to a hospital ward in a notorious prison where his government’s political prisoners had served their sentences.
  5. forestall
    keep from happening or arising; make impossible
    And in Trenton — which has already cut a third of its police force, hundreds of school district employees and at least 150 other public workers — the only way the city will forestall the loss of 60 more firefighters is if a federal grant comes through.
  6. taper
    diminish gradually
    The losses appeared to be tapering off earlier this year, but have accelerated for the last three months, creating the single biggest drag on the recovery in many areas.
  7. contention
    a dispute where there is strong disagreement
    Public workers became a point of contention in the presidential campaign recently when Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, criticized President Obama for wanting to increase the number of government employees through stimulus measures.
  8. furlough
    a temporary leave of absence, especially from military duty
    On Saturday, the teachers union ratified an agreement to save more than 4,000 jobs by taking furlough days.
  9. connoisseur
    an expert able to appreciate a field
    They were connoisseurs, this was their field of expertise, and a curator like Kirk Varnedoe, Mr. Elderfield’s predecessor at the Modern, would think nothing of offering his view of a drawing attributed to Rodin, his specialty.
  10. arbiter
    someone chosen to judge and decide a disputed issue
    The anxiety has even touched the supreme arbiter of the genuine and fake: the catalogue raisonné, the definitive, scholarly compendium of an artist’s work.
Created on Wed Jun 20 08:50:08 EDT 2012 (updated Wed Jun 20 09:02:53 EDT 2012)

Sign up now (it’s free!)

Whether you’re a teacher or a learner, Vocabulary.com can put you or your class on the path to systematic vocabulary improvement.