1. interest — a cause or business in which a person has a share
The conflicting interests between the king and the nobles initiated the events which culminated in the French Revolution.
2. purview — area of expertise
Standard & Poor’s insistence that the United States must immediately reduce its debt seems beyond its purview of judging whether the nation will pay off that debt in future years.
3. criterion — standard of judgment
One wonders if S&P applied the same criterion when it rated as triple-A the worthless home loan instruments that led to the financial catastrophe of 2008.
4. wayward — driven by willful deviation from norms to gratify one’s own desires
The wayward idiocies of politicians are often seen as conspiratorial, but more often are cases of naked self-interest winning out over any other values — if such still exist.
5. staggering — overwhelming, unbelievable
The number of staggering events in recent U.S. history seems to increase at an exponential rate, as constitutional crises dehisce from Watergate to Iran-Contra to the Lewinsky Affair to a very strange compulsion to war with Iraq, and we grow accustomed to the idea that people begging for money at every intersection is no concern of ours, that school teachers’ pensions cause our states’ financial problems, that CEOs making 130 times their employees’ wages just makes good business sense, that patents and copyrights are commodities to be traded like baseball cards rather than measures to protect actual creativity, as politicians lose office for sexual dalliances while spending (and receiving) hundreds of millions with each campaign, but I date the collapse of our civilization to the moment in time when we as a society somehow decided that it would be a good idea to have doctors and lawyers advertise as does any old cracker company.
6. inadvertent — unintentional; heedless
Forcing the king’s hand by encouraging the call for the Estates General, the French nobility had no inkling of the inadvertent consequences of their power play against Louis XVI.
7. maelstrom — a turbulent or tumultuous situation; a violent whirlpool
The Sun King’s son famously said, “After me, the deluge”, and the flood that washed away l’Ancien Régime plunged France and especially Paris into a seething maelstrom from which not all escaped.
8. chirography — handwriting
What visionary or prophet, what evaluator of questioned documents can read the chirography on our culture’s wall?
9. laggard — sluggish; dilatory
We may question our own laggard response to the rats gnawing into our finger bones, until we pick our teeth and see the foreign sinew between our own canines.
10. refractory — stubbornly disobedient
Ovid highlighted our refractory human nature, when he said “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor“.