Words and Terms in the News

coherent (a clear and consistent manner )
"The book is a deeply personal narrative that takes some liberties with the facts for the sake of a coherent tale."

composite (a conceptual whole made up of separate and related parts)
"(Some of the characters, he points out in the introduction, are composites.)"

intuit (understand or work out by intuition)
"Old friends contacted by NEWSWEEK who were present during the time he changed his name recall or intuit a mix of reasons—both personal and social."

poseur (a person who habitually pretends to be something he is not)
"By Obama's own account, he was, like most kids at that stage of life, a bit of a poseur—trying to be cool."

trajectory (the path followed by an object moving through space)
"The identity quest, which began before he became Barack and continued after, put him on a trajectory into a black America he had never really known as a child in Hawaii and abroad."

incendiary (arousing to action or rebellion)
"He could, for a time, shrug off Wright's more incendiary views, in part because he knew that whites, in their private worlds, often expressed or shrugged off bigotry themselves, partly because of fears that might seem irrational to African-Americans."

© 2008