No police check; neither of my referees had been contacted, and I was setting off to work in a hospital. […] There could hardly be a more lackadaisical way of being dumped into it to turn a quick buck for an agency.

lackadaisical (adj) : lacking spirit or liveliness; lethargic; listless; languid – source: Hard Work, p. 36

After the kiddie hanging (Jesus, who hasn’t wanted to dangle their masked children out of a hotel room at one point or another?), the court cases and all the other not always apocryphal tales of a ghastly life with surely only darkness at its heart, Jackson’s reputation is beyond tattered.

apocryphal (adj) : not canonical. Hence: Of doubtful authority; equivocal; mythic; fictitious; spurious; false – source: Word 2/2003, p. 97

In the immediate aftermath of his death there was a bit too much hagiography and there was bound to be a backswing.

hagiography (n) : a biography that idealizes or idolizes the person – source: Word 2/2003, p. 18

In fact, dressed in a casual short-sleeved shirt, with his beard and his big belly sticking out in front of him, he seems almost avuncular

avuncular (adj) : like an uncle in kindness or indulgence; ”showed avuncular concern” – source: Times Magazine 22.3.2002, p. 39

The connection between gender and grammar is humorously illustrated in the two epigrams to this chapter […]

epigram (n) : an effusion of wit; a bright thought tersely and sharply expressed, whether in verse or prose – source: Communicating gender in context, p. 51

In 1983, he was the subject of a New York Times investigation into an allegation that he recommended that the Army buy weapons from an Israeli company from whose owners he had, two years earlier, accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar fee. […] He had not recused himself in the matter, he explained, because the fee was for work he had done before he took the Defense Department job.

recuse (v) : to withdraw oneself from serving as a judge or other decision-maker in order to avoid a real or apparent conflict of interest; – often used with the reflexive; as, the judge recused himself due to a financial interest in the matter – source: New Yorker 17.3.2003, p. 78

Hence, some of the hitherto described and sometimes controversially discussed linguistic and interactional features, like interruption […] and other supposedly attenuating forms and strategies, as well as prosodic aspects like tempo and pitch, with their ascribed social meaning and their gender specific distribution (viz. gender stereotyped perception) might just correspond to these societies’ gender norms and types of arrangement […]

ascribe (v. t.) : to attribute, impute, or refer, as to a cause; as, his death was ascribed to a poison; to ascribe an effect to the right cause; to ascribe such a book to such an author – source: Communicating gender in context, p. 107

On top of the ziggurat, where the world’s first citizens surveyed sweet waters, date palms, canals, temples, gardens and palaces, the soldiers asked about my trip.

ziggurat (n) : a temple tower of the Babylonians or Assyrians, consisting of a lofty pyramidal structure, built in successive stages, with outside staircases, and a shrine at the top; – called also zikkurat – source: G2 25.03.2003, p. 4

Knight’s Salvation Mountain is a monument of American folk art, hailed by congresswoman Barbara Boxer – who led the petition to have Salvation Mountain enshrined as such – as ’a unique and visionary sculpture encompassing five acres’, an ’iridescent fusion of doves, clouds, flags, flowers, hearts, streams and Biblical messages’.

iridescent (adj) : having colours like the rainbow; exhibiting a play of changeable colours; nacreous; prismatic; as, iridescent glass – source: Observer Magazine 23.3.2003, p. 26

The black English vernacular of the United States presents especially vexed questions for the educational system and society as a whole.

vernacular (n) 1: a characteristic language of a particular group (as among thieves); ”they don’t speak our lingo” [syn: cant, jargon, slang, lingo, argot, patois] 2: the everyday speech of the people (as distinguished from literary language) – source: A History Of The English Language, p. 309