0426 Flashcards
(10 cards)
no spring chicken
The phrase ‘No Spring Chicken’ is usually used in a negative way to describe someone who is no longer young, probably past his young adulthood, and sometimes doesn’t realize it and tries to look and act younger than his age. Example of use: “I don’t know how old Mike is, but obviously he is no spring chicken.”
charming
But my mom adored her father, the charming, charismatic Temperance.
very pleasing or attractive
charismatic
1 having charisma
a natural ability to attract and interest other people and make them admire you
swat
She was always being swatted away by his girlfriends, who didn’t like having a reminder of his first marriage hanging around.
If you swat something such as an insect, you hit it with a quick, swinging movement, using your hand or a flat object.
ostensibly
The homelands were, ostensibly, the original homes of South Africa’s tribes., sovereign and semi-sovereign “nations” where black people would be free.
seeming to be the reason for or the purpose of something, but usually hiding the real reason or purpose
• The war was fought to remove a cruel dictator - at least that was the ostensible aim.
menial
Other than the menial wages sent home from the cities, families scraped by with little beyond substance-level farming.
menial work is boring, needs no skill, and is not important
scrape by
scrape by phrasal verb
1 to have just enough money to live
We can scrape by, thanks to what we grow ourselves.
2 to only just succeed in passing an examination or dealing with a difficult situation
gravy
My mom would have to fight with the bigger kids to get a handful of meat or a sip of the gravy or even a bone from which to suck out some marrow.
1 a sauce made from the juice that comes from meat as it cooks, mixed with flour and water
2 American English informal something good that is more than you expected to get
• If he succeeds, it is all gravy.
contrive
But my mother was blessed that her village was one of the places where a mission school had contrived to stay open in spite of the government’s Bantu education policies.
1 formal to succeed in doing something in spite of difficulties
contrive to do something
Schindler contrived to save more than 1,000 Polish Jews from the Nazis.
2 to arrange an event or situation in a clever way, especially secretly or by deceiving people
The lawsuit says oil companies contrived the oil shortage in the 1970s.
3 to make or invent something in a skilful way, especially because you need it suddenly
In 1862, a technique was contrived to take a series of photographs showing stages of movement.
pillage
Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to being everyone behind you back up to zero.
if soldiers pillage a place in a war, they steal a lot of things and do a lot of damage SYN plunder
