lewd
(continued)
licentious
lustful
prurient
salacious
wanton
lie
falsehood
fib
prevarication
rationalization
untruth
or love, but it does not necessarily imply action: lewd glances at every passing woman. Used of literature or art, it implies pornographic or obscene qualities: lewd graffiti on the subway posters. Used of behavior, it may be considerably weaker, suggesting only a provocative or suggestive seductiveness: the lewd poses of the chorus girls.
Licentious and wanton emphasize the active satisfaction of desire, although neither word is restricted in meaning to sexual impulse alone. Licentious can suggest any kind of excessive freedom in behavior that goes past legal or moral bounds or violates customary standards of behavior: a licentious attitude toward premarital affairs. Wanton, by contrast, does not suggest extreme freedom so much as unruly or wasteful self-indulgence. Used of people or people’s behavior it suggests sensuality more than sexuality: the wanton, fast-living jet set. Only in its sense of gratuitous does it suggest extreme inhumanity or cruelty: wanton slaughter.
Lustful and lecherous may suggest unacted-upon desire as well as the active seeking of satisfaction: a lecherous mood; a lustful disposition. Lustful, however, suggests a permanent character trait not likely to remain unexpressed. Lecherous can be used to refer to a momentary desire for a particular person: goaded by lecherous feelings for his new secretary. Neither of these words is likely to be used for pornographic materials designed to arouse desire.
Lascivious and prurient, unlike the other words here, tend to be restricted more specifically to having sexual desire than to acting upon it. Both words are commonly used to describe the feelings that pornography in particular is intended to incite, with prurient being the word favored in legal terminology: whether a book taken as a whole arouses prurient interests in the average person and is utterly without redeeming social importance. Lascivious is milder and stresses inclination, whereas prurient stresses susceptibility.
Salacious, alone of these words, most usually suggests the material intended to incite sexual fantasies or desires: salacious movies shown at stag parties.
In general, sexual impulses per se are not so widely disapproved of as formerly, and a present-day view of what should be classified as lewd and what as zestful high spirits would differ drastically from a 19th-century view. See dirty, erotic, indecent, passionate.
Antonyms: chaste, innocent, pure.
These words refer to statements or formulations that are misleading or contrary to fact. Lie is the most general of these, but it is exclusively restricted to a conscious and deliberate intention to distort the truth. [She told a lie about how much the new dress had cost her; It was a lie that no arms shipments were being sent to the front.] In heated debate, the word is often applied more loosely to inadvertent misstatements or statements thought to be hypocritical: It’s simply a lie that my opponent could carry out all these campaign promises without raising taxes. Sometimes, the word can apply to masking an unpleasant situation with a pleasant exterior: She was unwilling to live a lie for the sake of her husband’s political future. In the idiom give the lie to, a conclusive disproof of an assertion or theory is indicated: evidence that gave the lie to their claim of having remained strictly neutral during the crisis.
By contrast, rationalization is very specific, indicating a thought process by which one attempts to justify one’s actions, either to oneself or to others, by consciously or unconsciously distorting the truth. Al
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though psychologists may view all formulated explanations as rationalizations, the word has become a fad word for ingenious but specious reasoning that puts one’s own behavior in the most favorable light possible: The psychiatrist works to get behind the web of rationalizations to the real conflicts and anxieties they conceal; his rationalization that being late for work was a forgivable foible, considering how indispensable he was to the office; Nazis whose rationalization was that they were only obeying orders.
The remaining words can all be used as euphemisms for lie. Fib, the most informal of these words, is exclusively used in this way, suggesting a trivial, harmless, or forgivable lie: She turned him down with a fib about already having a date for the evening. The word may now sound a bit dated. Prevarication, the most formal word here, would be taken by many as an extremely offensive and overly fancy euphemism for lie ; as such, it might be useful as humor or irony: comforted that the commandment prohibiting lies said nothing about prevarication. The word can have a special area of meaning that refers not to bald misstatements of fact but to the deceptive statement of half-truths; this distinction would be lost on many people, however.
Falsehood and untruth, as euphemisms, are less formal circumlocutions than prevarication. Falsehood, however, has a legitimate reference to any incorrectness, whether intentional or not: The falsehood of this prevalent notion is now inescapable. Untruth can sometimes refer to fictions that were never intended to mislead or be taken as fact: Novelists devise untruths that sometimes have a greater validity than the statistical truths of the social sciences. See deception, guile, misleading, TRICK (n.) TRICK (v.).
Antonyms: honesty , truth , veracity .
Listing and list refer to any itemized series of names, words, etc., especially when recorded in a set order: a list of Representatives from the state of New York arranged by county; a listing of drugs authorized for sale by the Food and Drug Administration. Listing is also used to mean an entry in a list: Please check your listing in the new telephone book and notify us of any mistakes.
Register and roll apply to lists of names. A register is a formal or official written record of names or transactions: a register of births or deaths. Registers are typically designed to preserve important information for future reference. A roll, on the other hand, is often a temporary listing of names, as of students in a class or soldiers in a military unit: The teacher called the roll every morning to see who was absent. Any list of names may be called a roster, but the word usually refers to a list of names of men enrolled for a particular kind of duty. In the U.S. Army and in other service organizations, duty rosters are maintained to assure that special duties, such as guard duty and KP, are fairly assigned to each eligible man, that is, at roughly equal intervals; the order in which names are listed on rosters, therefore, is all-important.
Inventory and catalogue refer to special kinds of listings. An inventory is a list of articles with the description and quantity of each. Inventories are periodically taken in warehouses, factories, and retail stores to record the number and kind of articles in stock. A catalogue (or catalog, the standard spelling in most libraries) is a list or enumeration of names or objects, usually in alphabetical order and often with some accompanying description. A card catalog in a library lists the title and author of the book, periodical, etc., and other useful information, such
listing
catalogue
inventory
list
register
roll
roster
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