2 Flashcards
Not least
confound
Not least, the callow Kim Jong Un has confounded Pyongyang-watchers who had predicted that he would slavishly follow his late father’s recipe for keeping an iron grip on power.
particularly
[VERB] If someone or something confounds you, they make you feel surprised or confused, often by showing you that your opinions or expectations of them were wrong.
[ADJ] You use slavish to describe things that copy or imitate something exactly, without any attempt to be original.
blackmail
The late Kim ran the state as a mafia racket, earning hard currency from drugs, counterfeiting and illicit-arms sales while using his nuclear-weapons programme to blackmail the rest of the world for aid.
[NOUN] Blackmail is the action of threatening to reveal a secret about someone, unless they do something you tell them to do, such as giving you money.
threaten to V
[VERB] If a person threatens to do something unpleasant to you, or if they threaten you, they say or imply that they will do something unpleasant to you, especially if you do not do what they want.
dispatch
He diverted lavish resources to the army and to a tiny elite, and he ground nearly everyone else under his platform heel, dispatching perceived enemies to his prison camps in their hundreds of thousands.
[VERB] If you dispatch someone to a place, you send them there for a particular reason.
if nowhere else
Last month the couple graced the front row of a debut concert for the all-girl Moranbong Band, whose miniskirts, Disney cameos and foreign tunes all broke new ground, for North Korea if nowhere else.
다른 곳에서는 아닐지 모르지만
charade [ʃə’reɪd]
If it is merely another charade, then more pressure needs to be applied to the world’s ugliest regime.
[NOUN] If you describe someone’s actions as a charade, you mean that their actions are so obviously false that they do not convince anyone.
infantilism
[ɪn|fæntɪ|lɪzəm]
The imagery of state-sponsored infantilism persists:
[NOUN] a condition in which an older child or adult is mentally or physically undeveloped
uncannily [ʌn’kænɪli]
Kim Jong Un even looks uncannily like his grandfather.
[ADJ] If you describe something as uncanny, you mean that it is strange and difficult to explain.
vie [vaɪ]
The fact that North Koreans were so much better off in the cold-war days (when china and the Soviet Union vied to provide aid) sadly reinforces the nostalgia: the people in Mr Kim’s broken country earn less, eat less and use less electricity than they did 25 years ago.
[VERB] If one person or thing is vying with another for something, the people or things are competing for it.
monolithic [mɒnə’lɪθɪk]
The economy appears to be becoming both more open and less monolithic.
If you refer to an organization or system as monolithic, you are critical of it because it is very large and very slow to change, and does not seem to have different parts with different characters.
come to nothing
In the past economic reform has come to nothing.
not have a successful result
scrape
A decade ago, after the famine, price controls and rationing were scrapped, mainly because nothing was left to ration.
to decide not to continue with something such as a plan or an event
amount to
confiscation
In 2009 a currency “reform” amounted to a confiscation of hard-won savings, rendering North Koreans even more dependent on the state.
to be equal to or the same as something
If you confiscate something from someone, you take it away from them, usually as a punishment.
So there is every reason to remain suspicious.
분명히 -할만 하다.
crony /ˈkrəʊni/
A few cronies will get richer.
You can refer to friends that someone spends a lot of time with as their cronies, especially when you disapprove of them.
