Everyday Vocabulary

Sovereign: "Your words are empty like your future"

Sometimes someone in power might decide to give up that power and step down from his or her position. When they do that, they abdicate their authority, giving up all duties and perks of the job.

Fraught means filled with something — often something bad. Your Thanksgiving was fraught with awkward moments when your family saw your blue hair, and it only got worse when you told them you'd quit law school to join the circus.

adjective; filled with or attended with “words fraught with meaning” “an incident fraught with danger” Synonyms: pregnant, full containing as much or as many as is possible or normal

To describe a person or a solution that takes a realistic approach, consider the adjective pragmatic. The four-year-old who wants a unicorn for her birthday isn't being very pragmatic.

adjective; concerned with practical matters Synonyms: matter-of-fact, pragmatical, practical concerned with actual use or practice

adjective; of or concerning the theory of pragmatism Synonyms: pragmatical

adjective; guided by practical experience and observation rather than theory “not ideology but pragmatic politics” Synonyms: hard-nosed, hardheaded, practical, realistic aware or expressing awareness of things as they really are

Use tenacious to mean "not easily letting go or giving up," like a clingy child who has a tenacious grip on his mother's hand.

adjective; stubbornly unyielding “"a mind not gifted to discover truth but tenacious to hold it"- T.S.Eliot” “men tenacious of opinion” Synonyms: dogged, dour, persistent, pertinacious, unyielding, obstinate, stubborn, unregenerate tenaciously unwilling or marked by tenacious unwillingness to yield

adjective; sticking together “tenacious burrs” Synonyms: coherent, adhesive tending to adhere

If you're intuitive, you can probably guess what this word means just by looking at it. No? Maybe you're not so intuitive, after all. Intuitive means having the ability to understand or know something without any direct evidence or reasoning process.

adjective; spontaneously derived from or prompted by a natural tendency, “an intuitive revulsion” Synonyms: self-generated, spontaneous happening or arising without apparent external cause

The adjective amicable means "friendly" — but in particular, use it when describing relations one might otherwise expect to be unfriendly. The end of a romantic relationship that's less than amicable might involve broken dishes or broken bones.

Prosaic means ordinary or dull. Most of us lead a prosaic everyday life, sometimes interrupted by some drama or crisis.

adjective; lacking wit or imagination Synonyms: earthbound, pedestrian, prosy, uninteresting arousing no interest or attention or curiosity or excitement

adjective; not challenging; dull and lacking excitement Synonyms: commonplace, humdrum, unglamorous, unglamourous, unexciting not exciting

Something divergent is moving away from what is expected. Two divergent paths are moving in opposite directions — away from each other.

adjective; tending to move apart in different directions Synonyms: diverging, branching resembling the branches of a tree radiating diverging from a common point oblique slanting or inclined in direction or course or position--neither parallel nor perpendicular nor right-angled Antonyms: convergent tending to come together from different directions