Vocab Story

– Can you guess what the underlined words mean?

Set the scene. A Korean drama-esque setting. A chaeboel and his family are sitting at the dining table. His mother is opulently dressed in silk and a pure fox fur shawl. You can tell from her muted talk that she is not a naturally gregarious person unlike her son, who seeks out parties and company throughout all 24 hours of the day.

To his left is his sister who has just walked in, in a short skirt and blouse. Although she is naturally pulchritudinous, the layers and cakes of foundation on her face start to morph her beautiful face into one with a more spurious look as though she were a Barbie doll with a painted on face. Her mother glances at her and asks “You’re wearing that outside?” she states in a very candid but also demeaning tone. Her daughter replies with a swift and witty riposte “i only ever get my style from my very fashionable mother” she says without even looking up from her phone. The flat affect on her face indicates that her reply was laced with sarcasm.

The camera pivots to the front where the chaebeol’s father sits at the head of the table. He is a quiet man with an enigma about him that confuses most of his clients. As a businessman he is certainly no neophyte to the world of negotiation, and his perfected poker face only increases his ability to make good sales.

At last the food is brought in. The servers walk in a line but the head of the servers is the one with the most sour look, as if the frown has been etched in stone onto her face for years and years. She has a noisome scent that envelops the room the very minute she walks through the door. Its as if a cadaver were hiding under her skirts or a poisonous disease, endemic on her body was present, that no amount of perfume could hide.

Penury= extreme poverty/ “he died in a state of virtual penury”
Sanguine= optimistic or positive, especially in an apparently bad or difficult situation
Appraise= assess the value or quality of something, set a price of value to something/ she stealthily appraised him in a pocket mirror/ they appraised the painting at $200,000
Ascertain= verb,  find something out for certain, make sure of/ an attempt to ascertain the cause of the accident
Assay= verb, to determine the content or quality of (metal or ore)
Descry= to catch sight of/ she descried two figures.
Anomaly= something that deviates from what is standard, normal, or expected./
Homonym= when two words are spelled exactly the same but mean two different things- like bear (noun) and bear (verb)
Epigram= a pithy saying or remark expressing an idea in a clever and amusing way/ At his daughter’s wedding, Jason shared a heartwarming epigram he had written.
Graphite= a gray crystalline allotropic form of carbon which occurs as a mineral in some rocks and can be made from coke. It is used as a solid lubricant (Google)