| A | B |
|---|
| Condescending | arrogantly scornful |
| Zero-sum game | a situation where the gain of one person must be offset by the loss of another (compare against win-win situation) |
| Meticulous | carefully attentive to detail |
| Repellent | revolting |
| Nefarious | wicked, evil, reprehensible |
| Murk | gloom, shadow, darkness |
| Wheedle | to coax or charm |
| Appropriate (v.) | to take without permission or consent; to seize |
| Upright | respectably honest or conscientious |
| Harbor (v.) | to protect or shelter |
| Loophole | a means or opportunity of evading a rule, law, etc. |
| Predatory lending | An unscrupulous practice carried out to entice or assist a borrower in taking out a mortgage that carries high fees, a high interest rate, strips the borrower of equity, or places the borrower in a lower credit rated loan to the benefit of the lender |
| Ominous | threatening, menacing |
| Yahweh | A name for the God of the Old Testament |
| Ziggurat | A tower in the form of a terraced pyramid |
| Mandate | authorization of responsibility |
| Monitor (v.) | to oversee |
| Stifle | to smother or restrain |
| Chisel (v.) | to obtain by deception |
| Inadvertent | unintentional; not deliberate |
| Matrix | A situation or surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained |
| Flout | to disobey or defy |
| Incubator | A place or situation that permits or encourages the formation and development, as of new ideas |
| Authoritarian | severely controlling, dictatorial |
| Monolith | Something suggestive of a large block of stone, as in immovability, massiveness, or uniformity |
| Hegemony | the dominance or leadership of one social group or nation over others |
| Unscrupulous | dishonest or corrupt |
| probity | virtue or decency |
| ineptitude | incompetence |
| cynical | pessimistic or sarcastically distrustful |
| Parallelism | The use of identical or equivalent syntactic constructions in corresponding clauses or phrases |
| Anaphora | the deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs |
| Juxtaposition | the act of positioning literary or syntactic elements side-by-side for stylistic or rhetorical effect |
| Climactic | describes a series of related ideas so arranged that each surpasses the preceding in force or intensity |
| Hyperbole | exaggeration |
| Rhetorical | used for persuasive effect |
| Crux | the essence, root, core or heart of something |
| Metaphor | comparison of two unlike things without using such words as like or as. |
| Paradox | a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth. |
| Oxymoron | joining together contradictory terms (as in `deafening silence') |
| Chiasmus | a reversal in the order of words or concepts in two otherwise parallel phrases: he came in triumph and in defeat departs |
| Alliteration | use of the same consonant at the beginning of each stressed syllable in a line of writing |
