Tag Archives: diction/grammar/style/usage

OK, last but not least on this blessedly cool late-July morning, here is a context clues worksheet on the verb cajole. It means “to persuade with flattery or gentle urging especially in the face of reluctance,” “coax,” “to obtain from someone by gentle persuasion,” and “to deceive with soothing words or false promises.”

This isn’t, I will stipulate, a high-frequency word in English. It is, however, a useful one. This verb is only used transitively, do don’t forget your direct object: The teacher cajoled his students into reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Lately, I have been working slowly on a notebook full of Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Day that I compiled during the COVID quarantine. In general, most of these aren’t high frequency words in English, so I feel little pressure to work on them. Over time, I will complete them all and you will find them here.

One of the words that popped up as I paged through my notebook was the verb abide. It presents with moderately challenging polysemy; it means slightly different things in its intransitive and transitive forms. So, here is a worksheet on the verb abide used intranstively, and another as it is used transitively. To break this down (and you can find more under the first hyperlink in this paragraph), abide used intransitively (i.e. with no direct object) means “to remain stable or fixed in a state” and “to continue in a place.” To put this another way, as The Stranger (played by Sam Elliot) says, in The Big Lebowski, “The Dude abides.” As a transitive verb (direct object required), abide means “to wait for,” “await,” “to endure without yielding,” “withstand,” “to bear patiently,” “tolerate,” and “to accept without objection.” The worksheet is keyed principally to the first two meanings, particularly “to bear patiently.” Camilla abides her dentist’s office waiting room.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.