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Catch-22 vocabulary
268 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
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otiose
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synonyms: indolent, ~pleonastic, ~adscititious, ~de trop ???
► definition
Definition:1. unoccupied2. lazy3. done in a careless way, perfunctory, futile.Chambers's Twentieth Century Dictionary (1908)---Being at leisure or ease; unemployed; indolent; idle.Noah Webster. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1913)
► uses
Uses:
His own girl sat sprawled out graciously on an overstuffed sofa with an expression of otiose boredom.
Joseph Heller. Catch-22, p.244 (1961)
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they kept me in Apia till past ten, disputing, and consulting about brick and stone and native and hydraulic lime, and cement and sand, and all sorts of otiose details about the chimney – just what I fled from in my father’s office twenty years ago;
Robert Louis Stevenson. Vailima Letters
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a series of verities pertaining to a world more real than that in which I lived, which, once acquired, could never be taken from me again by any of the trivial incidents — even though it were the cause of bodily suffering — of my otiose existence.Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 2]
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I never had the honour of knowing Monsieur Taine,” M. de Charlus continued, with that irritating habit of inserting an otiose ‘Monsieur’ to which people in society are addicted, as though they imagine that by styling a great writer ‘Monsieur’ they are doing him an honour, perhaps keeping him at his proper distance, and making it evident that they do not know him personally.
Marcel Proust. In Search of Lost Time [volume 4]
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