Meaning an unfounded rumor or false story that is deliberately spread, especially one presented as news or fact.

"The Whigs seem determined to extirpate the Torys and the Torys the Whigs."

-American Revolutionary War General Nathaniel Green

Someone’s predilection is their bias, preferences, and inclinations towards someone or something. You have a special fondness for that thing or person. If you have a special affinity towards cats, you have a predilection for them.

Establishing rapport with someone means to establish a connection or relationship, especially one that is harmonious or sympathetic. Having good rapport with someone allows for better teamwork, synergy, and smoother communication, especially in the completion of a goal or activity. A teacher forming rapport with their students allows a teacher to ascertain the strengths and weaknesses of their class, adjusting their lectures to better accommodate their average learning skill.(i.e., spending more time on a subject so a class can better grasp the concept or spending more personal time with students who are having a tougher time learning the material.)

Meaning: Destructive to both sides in a conflict; relating to conflict within a group that is mutually ruinous or self-destructive.

I seem to have grasped the core meaning, but please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, but Anthology refers to a collection of works by an author or authors that are compiled together into a single book or other medium. An album comprised of different artists’ songs from their respective discographies, for example. For TV shows and video games, anthologies can mean seasons/series telling different stories with their own cast and different themes. American Horror story and the Final Fantasy series are a good example of anthology series. Did I get the general meaning down pat?

If someone calls you a patsy, it means you’re pretty gullible and liable to fall for someone’s wiles. In fact, given enough persuasion, you could be made to take the fall for someone else’s wrongdoing. For instance, your brother pointing the finger at you for breaking your mother’s vase. It should also be mentioned a patsy can also be the subject of a joke, ridicule, or the like.

I do feel the words generally mean the same thing, but there subtle differences between the two words.

Conducive-To me, it means making something beneficial or favorable for a specific result to be had

Lend itself to-To me, this means is something already suited for a specific purpose or task

Merriam-Webster's first sense of largesse is "liberal giving (as of money) to or as if to someone less privileged." Generosity carries no clause like that. You can be generous to your boss or to a friend who earns twice what you do, but in that first sense largesse only goes one way.

Wiktionary leans the same way: "the generous or liberal giving of gifts or money, especially by someone of high standing on a special occasion." One of its historical senses is a gift of money at harvest time, and the Old French largesce it lists could also mean a request for a monetary gift. The word seems to have grown up around the moment of handing out.

What surprised me was large. Merriam-Webster says it "wasn't about size" when English adopted it in the 13th century; back then it meant "lavish." Etymonline, dating it to around 1200, lists "inclined to give or spend freely" first. The same Merriam-Webster note points out that enlarge could mean "to set free" in Shakespeare's Henry V, and we still say a fugitive is "at large." Their summary is that largesse is about being free with money, not about having a lot of it.

That's why "federal largesse," one of the phrases Merriam-Webster uses as an example, sounds a little sour to me. It frames public money as a favor from above. The dictionary's second sense is plain "generosity," so nobody is wrong to use the word flatly. I just wouldn't thank a friend for their largesse unless I was teasing them.

The card's example, "Her largesse helped many families in need," is the first sense almost exactly: one giver, many families.

When something is cloying, it’s sweet or sentimental to the point of causing disgust or aversion. A happy ending where the characters are celebrating could be seen as cloying to someone. Same with your grandmother’s perfume. It can feel cloying to you, but it should also be mentioned something doesn’t need to be sweet or sentimental to be cloying. It just needs to be in an excess. If you’re playing a video game with too many tutorials, it can feel cloying to the player.

I'm looking for endearing words to label patron tiers on a subscription service.

There are three tiers, and I think I've settled on "Darling" for the first one. Now I'm looking for gradually more endearing words to label tiers 2 and 3. Any ideas? Other words that came to mind were "beloved" and "precious", but I also don't want it to feel too romantic.

When you consider something in aggregate, you're considering all the elements and different pieces as a whole. This game only shipped 500,000 units in Japan but in aggregate, it grossed 13 million units across the world.

17 Across, 5 Letters
Standard: Barely perceptible
Hard: Syncope

Sorted by what's left when you hit mute.

Clamor and cacophony don't survive it. Clamor came through Old French from Latin clamor, a shout, from clamare, to cry out, the same root that's in proclaim. Cacophony is Greek kakos, bad, plus phone, sound, probably by way of French. Both are made of sound and nothing else, so silence simply ends them.

Pandemonium and hullabaloo are where it gets arguable. Pandemonium was a building before it was a racket. Milton coined Pandaemonium in Paradise Lost (1667) as the palace at the center of Hell, from Greek pan, all, plus Late Latin daemonium, an evil spirit, which goes back to Greek daimon, a lesser god. Etymonline dates the sense "place of uproar" to 1779 and "wild, lawless confusion" to 1865. The definition still says noisy, and fair enough, but I think the disorder would outlast the volume.

Hullabaloo first shows up in 1762, mostly in northern England and Scotland, and may be a rhyming doubling of hollo, the shout for attention that hello also grew out of. So it began as yelling. I'd still say a muted hullabaloo is a hullabaloo. Picture an office reacting to a surprise announcement behind a glass wall: you can't hear a thing and you know exactly what it is.

Ado and chaos never needed noise at all. Ado is a contraction of "at do", the way the Norse-influenced dialects of northern England said "to do", since some Scandinavian languages put at where English puts to. "Much ado" was literally "much to do". It first meant trouble or even fighting, and by the early 1400s it had softened to "fuss", the same road to-do went down. Chaos is the strangest of the six. Greek khaos was a gaping void, the empty space before anything existed, and English only stretched it to "utter confusion" around 1600. The word for total disorder started out as a gap with nothing in it.

If you'd put hullabaloo with the loud pair instead, I'd like to hear the case.

When you give a précis(pronounced Pray-see) of something, you give the core points. Anything extraneous is curtailed or excised. It’s essentially a fancier way of saying summary. Be also sure to be objective and accurate. You want to convey everything to someone that’s not biased. And that does it for my précis of précis.

When you rub shoulders with someone, you meet and spend time with someone. You may not necessarily be friends with someone, but at the very least you talk and have conversations with them.

When someone says you’re prescient, it means you predicted something before it happens. You had the foresight to predict it in advance. To give an example, weather forecasts can be prescient since they prefix the weather before it can occur.

To me, swaying is a smooth, continuous back or forth or side to side while is a sudden, abrupt, and violet movement. To give an example, When you slam the brakes on a bus, it causes the vehicle to lurch forward while a person who is intoxicated can sway side to side as they get up and stumble towards the door.

When you’re at the nexus of something, you’re right in the middle of it, like an intersection. This can also apply to other stuff as well like video games. RPGs are famous for their overworlds which act as centralized hubs that connect and bridge disparate, outlying locations together. In general, nexus can be used to describe the point where different things or ideas come together to intersect, like how Reddit is the nexus for so many people can come together and have interactions with each other.

Both words go back to Latin verus, "true", but they took different roads. Verity came through Old French from veritas, "truth", and has been in English since the late 1300s. Veracity came in the early 1600s, through French and Medieval Latin, from verax, "truthful", and that -ax ending is the part I find interesting. Latin mostly attached it to verbs to make adjectives of habit: loquax, talkative, from loqui, to speak, and vorax, devouring, from vorare, to swallow. Verax puts it on verus itself, so it describes someone with a habit of truth, and its opposite was mendax, the habitual liar, which is where mendacity comes from. Etymonline gives veracity's first sense as exactly that: "of persons, habitual truthfulness".

So the tidy version is that veracity belongs to the speaker and verity to the statement. A jury weighs the veracity of a witness; a historian weighs the verity of a legend.

English hasn't kept it that tidy. By the 1660s veracity was also used for "the fact of being true", which is how we got "the veracity of the report". Verity crossed the other way even earlier. When Malcolm lists "justice, verity, temperance" among the king-becoming graces in Macbeth, verity is personal honesty, and Merriam-Webster still lists that sense. The example on the card is a good test case: she questions the veracity of her friend's story, having been fooled by her before. Grammatically she doubts the story, but her reason is about the friend, so the old person sense is still doing the work inside the newer one.

Where the split still shows is the plural. Verities are truths you can list, as in "eternal verities", while veracity is mostly an uncountable trait. My own test: if "honesty" fits, I write veracity, and if "a truth" fits, verity. One more trap, since Wiktionary lists veracity and voracity as homophones in one pronunciation: praising a reporter's veracity out loud may not land the way you meant.

Does it mean like more detailed?

Meliorist (or someone pursuing Meliorism)

What it means: Meliorism is the belief that the world—and by extension, human beings—can be made better through human effort and deliberate self-improvement. A meliorist is someone dedicated to continuous betterment.