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Most of the times when I read fiction as well as non-fiction books, I understand the meaning of new/difficult words from context but don’t think more about these. But I often find myself not able explain the meaning of the word to someone else. I recently changed my habit as an experiment and started noting the words where I have even a slight difficult in understanding and explaining meaning.

Here are four words that I came across recently:

Limpid. Clear. Limpid: Clear. Example: He writes in a limpid style.

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Limpid. Clear.

Prosaic: Not challenging. (Like prose rather than poetry). नीरस. Example: The title of your book is so prosaic that most people are going to walk right past it in the store.¹

If I looked up prosaic in the dictionary, it would probably say, “Immune to poetry. See also Mendes comma Sofia.”8

Photo Source: Memegenerator.net

Banality: Being banal (a thing that has no original creativity or spark²), Unoriginality. Triviality.

Riff: (verb) to speak for a long time on a particular subject, especially in a humorous way.3 Example: We called the show Thinking Things Over, and much of the time we riffed.4

Pretentious: To pretend to be something you are not.5 Someone or something that try to seem important or significant but they are not.6

Examples:

I, on the other hand, was hired to work in the bar upstairs, a faux upscale taproom with an English private club motif: leather fauteuils, pretentiously bound hardcovers in fake bookshelves, and port in the well. In a stroke of genius, the owners had baptized the place the Nineteenth Avenue Diner.7

It might feel that this process is sort of look like a waste of time. But while writing this article and finding correct images and examples for each word has certainly made those words store firmly on my memory.

  1. https://wordsinasentence.com/prosaic-in-a-sentence
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogx1nnYSn_U
  3. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/riff
  4. The Best American Essays 2020 (https://books.google.co.in/books/about/The_Best_American_Essays_2020.html?id=9l_IDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y)
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2SJKCxTmrM
  6. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/pretentious
  7. The Best American Essays 2020 (https://books.google.co.in/books/about/The_Best_American_Essays_2020.html?id=9l_IDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y)
  8. The Sparrow (p. 242) by Mary Doria Russell. Transworld. Kindle Edition.

- Update: 2 December 2020: Added an example from The Sparrow
- Update: 2 December 2020: Added category vocabulary