Mar 09, 2006

susceptible

Easily influenced or affected: "She suddenly was too susceptible to her past" Jimmy Breslin.

2. Likely to be affected: susceptible to colds.

3. Especially sensitive; highly impressionable.

4. Permitting an action to be performed; capable of undergoing: a statement susceptible of proof; a disease susceptible to treatment.

The United States may have the power to cause harm and pain but it is also susceptible to harm and pain.
– Javad Vaeedi, the deputy head for international affairs of Iran 's Supreme National Security Council


subvert

To undermine the character, morals, or allegiance of; corrupt.

To overthrow completely: "Economic assistance ... must subvert the existing ... feudal or tribal order" Henry A. Kissinger.

subversive, subversion

sully

1. To mar the cleanness or luster of; soil or stain.

2. To defile; taint.

too good to sully with analysis

I found something more fun than complaining
I'm going to ask people if they know their servants' last name, or in case of butlers, their first.
--Lisa Simpson, The class Stuggle in Sprinfield

tran·scen·dent (trn-sndnt)

adj.

1. Surpassing others; preeminent or supreme.

2. Lying beyond the ordinary range of perception: "fails to achieve a transcendent significance in suffering and squalor" National Review.

3. Philosophy

a. Transcending the Aristotelian categories.

b. In Kant's theory of knowledge, being beyond the limits of experience and hence unknowable.

4. Being above and independent of the material universe. Used of the Deity.

The Baroque era saw rational though and logic as transcendent.

profligate

1. Given over to dissipation; dissolute.

2. Recklessly wasteful; wildly extravagant.

n.

A profligate person; a wastrel.

U.S. is profligate.

Mar 01, 2006

Soothsayer

One who claims to be able to foretell events or predict the future; a seer.

In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read.

--Shakespear, Antony and Cleopatra

homage

1. Ceremonial acknowledgment by a vassal of allegiance to his lord under feudal law.

2. Special honor or respect shown or expressed publicly. See Synonyms at honor.

Let me be married
to three kings in a forenoon, and widow them all:
let me have a child at fifty, to whom Herod of Jewry
may do homage: find me to marry me with Octavius
Caesar, and companion me with my mistress.
--same as above

cuckold

A man married to an unfaithful wife.

Opposite of love is not hate, but silence.
-- Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel