Vocabulary Week Three

Poise(noun) Zeal(noun) The soldiers carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Great coolness and composure under strain. Some of the soldiers carried themselves with a sort of wistful resignation, others with pride or stiff soldierly discipline or good humor or macho zeal. A feeling of strong eagerness.

Comport (verb) Vacant (adj.) The Chaperones on the trip expected everyone to comport themselves appropriately and politely. To behave in a particular way. Sometimes I sit at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and I feel the boredom dripping inside myself like a leaky faucet. Void of thought or knowledge.

Frugal (adj.) Naïve (adj.) Courage comes to us in limited quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest you think you can save it for another day. Avoiding waste. Saving. I was young and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Marked by or showing unaffected simplicity and lack of guile or worldly experience.

Deferment (noun) Exile(noun) The government had ended most graduate school deferments; the waiting lists for the National Guard and Reserves were impossibly long; my health was solid; I didn’t qualify for CO status—no religious grounds, no history as a pacifist. The act of putting off to a future time. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile from my family and country. The act of expelling a person from their native land.

Acquiescence(noun) Pious (adj.) Being a physician requires complete acquiescence to the intellectual and emotional demands of the career, from the first day of medical school onward. Passive agreement without objection. Mr. Bates is a pious Catholic, and he attends church daily. Having or showing or expressing reverence for a deity.