AP Lit Vocab #9

obsequious (adj.)

Marked by or exhibiting a fawning attentiveness.

requite (v.)

To make return for: repay. To make retaliation for revenge. To make suitable return to for a benefit or for an injury.

calumnious (adj.)

False and damaging to someone's reputation.

conceit (n.)

A result of mental activity: thought. Individual opinion. Favorable opinion; especially: excessive appreciation of one's own worth or virtue. A fancy item or trifle. A fanciful idea. An elaborate or strained metaphor. An organizing theme or concept.

wharf (n.)

A structure built along or at an angle from the shore of navigable waters so that ships may lie alongside to receive and discharge cargo and passengers.

quintessence (n.)

The essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form. The fifth and highest element in ancient and medieval philosophy that permeates all nature and is the substance composing the celestial bodies. The most typical example or representative.

ignoble (adj.)

Of low birth or common origin: plebeian. Characterized by baseness, lowness, or meanness.

visage (n.)

The face or appearance of a person, or sometimes an animal. The manifestation, image, or aspect of something.

discourse (n.)

Verbal interchange of ideas. Formal and orderly and usually extended expression of thought on a subject. A mode of organizing knowledge, ideas, or experience that is rooted in language and its concrete contexts (such as history or institutions).

countenance (n.)

A person's face or facial expression. Support or approval; bearing or expression that offers approval or sanction: moral support.

convocation (n.)

An assembly of persons called together to a meeting. A formal ceremony for the conferment of university awards. The act or process of calling an assembly of persons to a meeting.

importunate (adj.)

Troublesomely urgent: overly persistent in request or demand. Troublesome.

apt (adj.)

Unusually fitted or qualified: ready. Unusually fitted or qualified. Ordinarily disposed: inclined. Suited to a purpose; especially being to the point. Keenly intelligent and responsive.

churlish (adj.)

Rude in a mean-spirited and surly way. Difficult to work with or deal with: intractable.

havoc (n.)

Wide and general destruction: devastation. Great confusion and disorder.

heroic couplet

Two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit.

blank verse

Unrhymed lines of ten syllables, each with the even-numbered syllables bearing the accents. Blank verse has been called the most "natural" verse form for dramatic works, since it supposedly is the verse form most close to natural rhythms of English speech, and it has been the primary verse form of English drama and narrative poetry since the mid-sixteenth Century. Such verse is blank in rhyme only; it usually has a definite
meter.

free verse

Poetry which is not written in a traditional meter but is still rhythmical.

jargon

The special language of a profession or group. The term jargon usually has pejorative associations, with the implication that jargon is evasive, tedious, and unintelligible to outsiders.

soliloquy

A monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions. The soliloquy often provides necessary but otherwise inaccessible information to the audience. The dramatic convention is that whatever a character says in a soliloquy to the audience must be true, or at least true in the eyes of the character speaking (i.e., the character may tell lies to mislead other characters
in the play, but whatever he states in a soliloquy is a true reflection of what the speaker believes or feels).

aside

In drama, a few words or a short passage spoken by one character to the audience while the other actors on stage pretend their characters cannot hear the speaker's words. It is a theatrical convention that the aside is not audible to other characters on stage.

mise-en-scene

The stage setting of a play, including scenery and props

dramatis personae (latin: “people of the play”)

A list of the complete cast, i.e., the various characters that will appear in the play. This list usually appears before the text of the main play begins in printed copies of the text.

deus ex machina (from Greek theos apo mechanes)

An unrealistic or unexpected intervention to rescue the protagonists or resolve the story's conflict. The term means "The god out of the machine," and it refers to stage machinery. A classical Greek actor, portraying one of the Greek gods in a play, might be lowered out of the sky onto the stage and then use his divine powers to solve all the mortals' problems. The term is a negative one, and it often implies a lack of skill on the part of the writer.

catastrophe

The "turning downward" of the plot in a classical tragedy. By tradition, the catastrophe occurs in the fourth act of the play after the climax.

salus (n.) salus, salutis

Health, well-being

sub (prep.)

Under

tacitus (adj.)

Silent

mitto (v.) mitto, mittere, misi, missus

To send

rumpo (v.) rumpo, rumpere, rupi, ruptus

To break, split, burst, upset