<Young, youthful, boyish, girlish, juvenile, puerile, immature, callow, adolescent.>
Sentences: The plan had all the faults of ____ judgment. Many great authors have written books of ____ fiction. The bird, which was still ____, was of course unable to fly. "Such sights as ____ poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream." He was in that ____ stage of development when one is neither a boy nor a man. "I was so ____, I loved him so, I had No mother, God forgot me, and I fell." He made a[n] ____ attempt to impress them with his importance. "Bacchus ever fair, and ever ____." A red necktie gave him a more ____ appearance. The self-satisfied air of a[n] ____ youth is often trying to his elders.
EXERCISE D
In this exercise each group of synonyms is followed by quotations from authoritative writers in which the words are discriminatingly employed. Find the meaning of each italicized word in these quotations, and differentiate the word accurately from the others in that group. Substitute for it other words from the group, and observe precisely how the meaning is affected.
(So many of the quotations are from poetry that these will be printed as verse rather than, as in the preceding exercises, in continuous lines like prose.)
<Affront, insult, indignity.>
A moral, sensible, and well-bred man
Will not affront me,—and no other can.
An old affront will stir the heart
Through years of rankling pain.
The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
It is often better not to see an insult than to avenge it.
Even a hare, the weakest of animals, may insult a dead lion.