AP English and Composition – Art of the Personal Essay Vocabulary – Flashcards

To beat or strike repeatedly, especially with the fist or hand. Ex: "I hear the smack of a hand pummeling his shoulders, the sound varying according as it comes down flat and cupped." -Seneca, "On Noise"

To carry about from place to place and offer for sale; to cry in the street. A "hawker" is someone who sells goods on the street by walking about and announcing the deals. Comes from the term "hawker," a person who trains and manages hawks to swoop down and catch prey. The word "hawk" can also mean an effort to clear one's throat of phlegm with great noise or the phlegm that is coughed up in the process. Ex: "Then think of the various cries of the man selling drinks, and the one selling sausages and the other selling pastries, and all the ones hawking for the catering shops, each publicizing his wares with a distinctive cry of his own." -Seneca, "On Noise" Ex: "When we recline at table one slave wipes up the hawking, another crouches to take up the leavings of the drunks." -Seneca, "Slaves"

Agitation or excitement; tumult. Comes from ferment meaning yeast or leaven, which agitates the mixture into fermentation. Ex: "His mind is in a ferment. It is that which needs to be set at peace." -Seneca, "On Noise"

Offended, irritated, excited. Ex: "Yet every now and then ambition rears its head again in the retreat into which we were really driven by our apprehensions and our waning interest; for our ambition did not cease because it had been rooted out, but merely because it had tired—or become piqued, perhaps, at its lack of success." -Seneca, "On Noise"

Lighted; illuminated; dyed with coloring; slang for being "drunk." NOTE: Look at the context to understand the stipulative meaning within the writing. Ex: "We, too, are lit and put out." -Seneca, "Asthma"

To utilize for one‟s own end; to treat selfishly as mere workable material; accomplish; achieve; execute; perform; to fight; to achieve the expulsion of; to apply or exert oneself Ex: "His soul, I am convinced, has returned to the heavens whence it came, not because he commanded great armies—mad Cambyses did that, and exploited his madness to good effect—but because of his singular moderation and piety." -Seneca, "Scipio‟s Villa"

To chastise, correct, inflict corrective punishment; has come to insinuate severe punishment or rebuke. Ex: "Your own attitude is consequently as right as can be, in my judgment; you do not choose to have your slaves fear you, you use words to castigate them." -Seneca, "Slaves"

A sudden change of mind without apparent or adequate motive; a whim; a mere fancy. Ex: "It is our daintiness that drives us to distraction, so that anything that does not meet our caprice provokes our wrath." -Seneca, "Slaves"

Without piety or reverence towards God; presumptuously irreligious, wicked, or profane. Ex: "Nor do we visit their tombs and monuments or keep solemn wakes at their bodies. Our laws do not permit such practices because it is an impious thing to mourn for those who are so quickly translated to a better region and a divine lot." -Plutarch, "Consolation to His Wife"

Foreshadows; gives ominous warning; preindication; token; omen. Ex: "This double body and these several limbs, connected with a single head, might well furnish a favorable prognostic to the king that he will maintain under the union of his laws these various parts and factions of our state." -Montaigne, "Of a Monstrous Child"

State of joy; joyous; cheerfulness; merriness; happiness. Ex: "In my youth I needed to warn and urge myself to stick to my duty: blitheness and health do not go so well, as they say, with these wise and serious reflections." -Montaigne, "On Some Verses of Virgil"

A person beloved by one of the opposite sex; a love, a sweetheart; the lady-love of a knight, thus the one for whom he did battle; object of chivalrous admiration and attachment; an illicit or clandestine lover, who takes the place of a husband or wife, but without any rights of such a relationship. Ex: "No woman who savors the taste of it, would want to have the place of a mistress or paramour to her husband." -Montaigne, "On Some Verses of Virgil"

Marked by confusion and uproar; disorderly and noisy; violent; clamorous; turbulent. Ex: "There is naturally strife and wrangling between them and us: the closest communion we have with them is still tumultuous and tempestuous." -Montaigne, "On Some Verse of Virgil"

Inciting lust; wantonness; in a lighter sense, voluptuousness or luxurious. Ex: "Iniquitous appraisal of vices! Both we and they are capable of a thousand corruptions more harmful and unnatural than lasciviousness." -Montaigne, "On Some Verses of Virgil"

To utter abusive language; act of abuse; to rally against. Ex: "Since we cannot attain to greatness, let us have our revenge by railing at it." -Montaigne, as quoted in Cowley, "Of Greatness"

Separated; cut off from congenial surroundings; eliminated. Ex: "If I were but in his condition, I should think it hard measure, without being convinced of any crime, to be sequestrated from it, and made one of the principal officers of state." -Cowley, "Of Greatness"

A foolish and conceited person; a pretender to wit, wisdom or accomplishments; one who is foolishly attentive to appearance, dress or, manners. Ex: "This is the character that Seneca gives of this hyperbolical fop, whom we stand amazed at, and yet there are very few men who are not in some things, and to some degrees, grandiose." -Cowley, "Of Greatness"

A display intended to attract notice or admiration; vulgar; exaggerated exhibition; a spectacle; a mere or false show; a pretense. Ex: "I may safely say that all the ostentation of our grandees is just like a train, of no use in the world, but horribly cumbersome and incommodious." -Cowley, "Of Greatness"

Being destitute; void of the necessities of life; want; poverty. Ex: "But, yet with most of them it was much otherwise; and they fell perpetually into such miserable penury, that they were forced to devour or squeeze most of their friends and servants, to cheat with infamous projects, to ransack and pillage all their provinces." -Cowley, "Of Greatness"

Good-humor ridicule; bantering. Ex: "He says very handsomely in his own excuse, that he does not act for gain, that he indulges an innocent pleasure in it; and that it is better to pass away an evening in this manner than in gaming and drinking: but at the same time says, with a very agreeable raillery upon himself, that if his name should be known, the ill-mannered world might call him, „the ass in the lion‟s skin.‟" -Addison, "Nicolini and the Lions"

To take up; absorb; assimilate; saturate. Ex: "Hence it is, that good nature in me is no merit; but having been so frequently overwhelmed with her tears before I knew the cause of any affliction, or could draw defenses from my own judgment, I imbibed commiseration, remorse, and an unmanly gentleness of mind, which has since ensnared me into ten thousand calamities; and from whence I can reap no advantage, except it be, that, in such a humor as I am now in, I can the better indulge myself in the softness of humanity, and enjoy that sweet anxiety which arises from the memory of past afflictions." -Steele, "An Hour or Two Sacred to Sorrow"

Faculty or power of seeing; sight; intelligent or comprehending vision; to examine or to observe with understanding; contemplation, consideration or profound study of some object. Ex: "To be ever unconcerned, and ever looking on new Objects with an endless Curiosity, is a Delight known only to those who are turned for Speculation: Nay, they who enjoy it, must value things only as they are the Objects of Speculation, without drawing any worldly Advantage to themselves from them, but just as they are what contribute to their Amusement, or the Improvement of the Mind." -Steele, "Twenty-Four Hours in London"

When pertaining to a person: lively, volatile, restlessness; liable to sudden and unpredictable changes; quick-witted, imaginative. Ex: "One of them was a mercurial gay-humored Man; the other a Man of a serious, but a great and gallant Spirit." -Steele, "Love-Letters"

The chance or luck (good or bad) that falls to anyone as his particular lot in life or in any particular affair; a hap, accident; an event or incident befalling anyone; an adventure. Ex: "Such, Mr. Rambler, are the changes which have happened in the narrow space where my present fortune has fixed my residence." -Johnson, "The Boarding House"

Disturbance; disorder; commotion; mental agitation or disquietude; trouble. Ex: "Such men are in haste to retire from grossness, falsehood and brutality; and hope to find in private habitations at least a negative felicity, and exemption from the shocks and perturbations with which public scenes are continually distressing them." -Johnson, "Solitude of the Country"

To bring a charge against one‟s accuser; to make a counter accusation; to return or retort against or upon a person. Ex: "As a supplement to reasoning comes recrimination: the pleasure of proving that you are right is surely incomplete till you have proved that your adversary is wrong; this might have been a secondary, let it now become a primary object with you; rest your own defense on it for further security: you are no longer to consider yourself as obliged either to deny, palliate, argue, or declaim, but simple to justify yourself by criminating another; all merit, you know, is judged of by comparison." -Edgeworth, "The Noble Science of Self-Justification"

Quality of being stubborn, inflexible, persistent. Ex: "Thus, my dear pupils, I have endeavored to provide precepts adapted to the display of your several talents; but if there should be any amongst you who have no talents, who can neither argue nor persuade, who have neither the sentiment nor enthusiasm, I must indeed—congratulate them; they are peculiarly qualified for the science of Self-Justification: indulgent nature, often even in the weakness, provides for the protection of her creatures: just Providence, as the guard of stupidity, has enveloped it with the impenetrable armor of obstinacy." -Edgeworth, "The Noble Science of Self-Justification"

Irrational; baseless; fabulous, imaginary, unreal; perversely or irrationally imagined. Ex: "If these speculations seem fantastical to thee, reader—(a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of the way of thy sympathy, and am singularlyconceited only, I retire, impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom cloud of Elia." -Lamb, "New Year‟s Eve"

Crying like a child; whining; feebly wailing; pining; ailing; weakly; sickly. Ex: "Where be those puling fears of death, just now expressed or affected?—Passed like a cloud—absorbed in the purging sunlight of clear poetry—clean washed away by a wave of genuine Helicon, your only Spa for those hypochondries—And now another cup of the generous!" -Lamb, "New Year‟s Eve"

Plentifully; abundantly; with fullness or treatment or expression; fully, profusely. Ex: "I am, I think, rather delicately than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness, in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets—those indispensable sideintelligencers." -Lamb, "A Chapters on Ears"