12 July 2016

• Unfetter: Release from restrain or inhibition
• Sawatsky felt comfortable enough this summer to invite me to Bristol and offer unfettered access to his seminar. (David Folkenflik)
• Eviscerate: To take out the internal organ of an animal
• John Sawatsky methodically eviscerates the nation's most prominent television journalists. (David Folkenflik)
• Cross the Rubicon: To make a decision that cannot be changed later
• It can bridge the ever expanding void between stasis and evolution, which is precisely the Rubicon we have been struggling to cross for so many years. (Martin Binks) 

11 July 2016

• Pipe dream: Any fantastic notion, hope or story.
• Rouhani's dream to unite Muslims under the banner of Iran is a pipe dream. It will never happen. (Micah Halpern)
• Shoot from the hip: To act or speak on the matter without forethought.
• Like Trump, the Ugandan president seemed to be shooting from the hip. (Jerusalem Post)
• Fly in the face of: To act in defiance of (authority, customs etc.).  
• I also lamented our self-imposed fondness for incrementalism, which not only flies in the face of the spirit of innovation we routinely espouse but is perilously at odds with the realities of life beyond our ivory towers. (Martin Binks)

4 July 2016

• Oafish: Rough or clumsy and unintelligent.
• (Simon Critchley)
• Flake away: (For bits of something) to brake away from the whole gradually or from natural causes.
• Amidst all this madness, all these ghosts and memories of times passed, it feels like world around me is crumbling, slowly flaking away. (Fatima Bhutto) 
• Malleable: Capable of being shaped or formed, as by hammering or pressure. 
• Abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. (Heidi Grant Halvorson) 
• The human brain is malleable, making it hard to distinguish between activities for which humans might be fundamentally wired, and those for which our minds are simply adjusting to meet the demands of the moment. (Cal Newport in The New Yorker)  (14/11/22)
• Cultures are more malleable than people, and often we view foreignness as precisely that, something that won't change us. (Mark Fried) 21/11/22 

3 July 2016

• Execrable: Extremely bad or unpleasant.
• I could go on, but truly the quality of England's moving and passing was execrable.(Simon Critchley)
• Scurrilous: Making or spreading scandalous claims about someone with the intention of damaging their reputation. 
• It was rather amusing to read last week that Bild, the scurrilous but very widely-read German tabloid newspaper, even offered to recognize the legitimacy of that goal if the English decided to stay in EU. (Simon Critchley) 
• Minutiae: The small, precise or trivial details of something.
• There may have been better chroniclers who evoked the hellish minutiae of the German death machine. (Joseph Berger)