Vocabulary Week Three

Poise(noun) Zeal(noun) Great coolness and composure under strain. The soldiers carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. A feeling of strong eagerness. 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.

Comport (verb) Vacant (adj.) To behave in a particular way. The Chaperones on the trip expected everyone to comport themselves appropriately and politely. Void of thought or knowledge. 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.

Frugal (adj.) Naïve (adj.) Avoiding waste. Saving. 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. Marked by or showing unaffected simplicity and lack of guile or worldly experience. I was young and politically naive, but even so the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong.

Deferment (noun) Exile(noun) The act of putting off to a future time. 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 expelling a person from their native land. I feared the war, yes, but I also feared exile from my family and country.

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