• abstruse – obscure, difficult to understand

• aghast – horrified, overcome with shock and dismay

• agog – intensely interested, excited, or eager

• alliteration – a poetic or literary effect achieved by using several words that begin with the same or similar consonants, as in “Whither wilt thou wander, wayfarer?”

• apparatchik – a subordinate who is unquestioningly loyal to a powerful political leader or organization; a member of the administrative organization or staff apparat of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union and other Communist states

• apprise – to inform or give notice to somebody about something

• aspersory – slanderous, attacking someone’s character or reputation, defamatory

• assonance – the similarity of two or more vowel sounds or the repetition of two or more consonant sounds, especially in words that are close together in a poem

• banality – conventional, unremarkable, boring, or dull ordinariness

• bemusement – what causes one to be bewildered, confused, or puzzled

• emanation – the act of emitting, sending out, or giving out something; something that issues or is sent out or given out from somebody, something, or somewhere

• fortuitous – accidental, unplanned, happening by chance, especially giving rise to a fortunate outcome

• impervious – not responsive, remaining unmoved and unaffected by other people’s opinions, arguments, or suggestions; not allowing passage into or through something

• inane – irritatingly silly or time-wasting; empty, insubstantial, or void

• inure – transitive verb: harden somebody to something, to make somebody used to something unpleasant over a period of time, so that he or she no longer is bothered or upset by it; intransitive verb: to come into legal operation or effect

• peroration – to finish a speech by summarizing its main points

• quotidian – commonplace, of the most ordinary everyday kind; done or experienced on a daily basis

• revanche – policy of reclaiming territory, a nation’s or an ethnic group’s policy of regaining lost territory

• trope – figure of speech, a word, phrase, expression, or image that is used in a figurative way, usually for rhetorical effect

• ululation – to howl or wail, in grief or in jubilation