Fall Vocabulary List #5

Acumen: keen insight; shrewdness

--People with financial acumen are bound to make decisions that ensure their economic stability.

Adjudicate: to pronounce or decree by judicial sentence/to settle or determine an issue or dispute judicially

--Judge Judy adjudicated the opponents' dispute.
Anachronism: something or someone that is not in its correct or chronological historical time

--As children, a caveman riding a dinosaur in a cartoon seemed perfectly logical; however, after going to school, we learned that dinosaurs in the time of cavemen are actually an anachronisms.
Apocryphal: of doubtful authorship or authority/false, spurious

--Though the story sounds apocryphal and ridiculous, I can assure you that it is actually true.
Disparity: lack of similarity or equality; inequality; difference

--One can tell that the signature on the "priceless" baseball card is forged, once s/he sees the disparities between the real signature and the fake.
Dissimulate: to disguise or conceal under a false appearance; dissemble

--Worrying that he might appear weak, the man dissimulated his fear and kept walking through the dark forest despite his true feelings.
Empirical: derived from or guided by experience or experiment/depending on experience or observation 

alone, without using scientific method or theory, esp. in medicine

--The law is based on purely empirical findings and makes no attempt to actually explain the phenomenon.
Flamboyant: strikingly bold or brilliant; showy; conspicuously dashing and colorful/ornate; elaborately styled

--The lorikeets at the zoo had beautiful,  flamboyant feathers.
Fulsome: offensive to good taste, especially as being excessive; overdone or gross/disgusting, sickening, repulsive/excessive or insincerely lavish

--There were fulsome amounts of greasy fast food and rich desserts piled on the table.
Immolate: to sacrifice/to kill as a sacrificial victim, as by fire; offer as sacrifice/to destroy by fire

--The victim suffered a brutal immolation as she was thrown into the lava by volcano-worshiping natives.
Imperceptible: very slight, gradual; subtle/not perceptible

--The magician shocked and amused people when he used imperceptible sleight of hand to make their card appear.
Lackey: a servile follower; toady/a footman or liveried manservant

--Kasie acted as Sarah's lackey and carried her books around all day, brought her lunch, and did whatever she asked.
Liaison: the contact or connection maintained by communications between units of the armed forces or of any other organization in order to ensure concerted action, cooperation, etc./the person who initiates or maintains such a contact or connection/an illicit sexual relationship

--The school principal acted as a liaison between the two squabbling children so they would properly apologize to each other.

Monolithic: made only of one stone/consisting of one piece; solid, unbroken/characterized by massiveness, uniformity, rigidity, invulnerability

--The ego of the artist that created a marble statue of Paul Bunyan was almost as monolithic as the work itself.
Mot juste: the exact, appropriate word

--He paused so as to find the mot juste in describing his feelings for her; he wanted his letter to be perfect.
Nihilism: a total rejection of established laws and institutions/anarchy, terrorism, or any other revolutionary activity/(philosophy)an extreme form of skepticism; the denial of all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth

--The nihilist didn't think twice about tossing a Molotov cocktail through the police station window; after all, he was certain that it didn't matter, seeing as there was no real truth in any law, science, or religion.
Patrician: a person of noble or high rank; aristocrat/a person of very good background, education, and refinement

--The haughty patrician walked by the unworthy plebeians with her nose in the air.
Propitiate: to make favorable inclined; appease; conciliate

--The sacrifice was made to propitiate the volcano gods.
Sic: to attack/to incite to attack/so; thus: usually written parenthetically to denote that a word, phrase, passage, etc., that may appear strange or incorrect has been written intentionally or has been quoted verbatim

--The famous author signed his name as e.e. cummings [sic]./The man told his big, growling dog to sic the intruders.
Sublimate: to divert the energy of (a sexual or other biological impulse) from its immediate goal to one of a more acceptable social, moral, or aesthetic nature or use.

-- Artists tend to sublimate their impulses and emotions into beautiful and interesting pieces of art or music.