释义
malingerer
(once / 68717 pages)
n
Have you ever pretended to be sick or hurt to get out of taking a test or doing a chore? Then you, my dear, are a malingerer, and should be ashamed of yourself. Shape up!
Knowing that the prefix mal is from the Latin for “bad,” we can tell right off that being a malingerer is not a good thing. This noun form of the verb malinger comes from the French malingre which means “sickly.” (Obviously, it’s bad to pretend to be sick.) In Jack London’s Call of the Wild , the new dog, Pike, is referred to as “a clever malingerer and thief,” giving a clear negative context to the word.
TASTY MORSELS Vocabulary Shout-Out: William Styron for "Malingerer"
In William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner , the 19th century Virginian slave Nat Turner, who will go on to lead a rebellion, imagines what his fate would have been had he not been taught by his white master how to read.
Well, under these circumstances I would doubtless have become…mildly efficient at some stupid task like wringing chickens' necks or smoking hams or polishing silver, a
malingerer wherever possible yet
withal too jealous of my security to risk real
censure or trouble and thus cautious in my tiny thefts, circumspect in the secrecy of my afternoon naps, furtive in my anxious lecheries with the plump yellow-skinned cleaning maids upstairs in the dark attic, growing ever more servile and unctuous as I became older, always the crafty flatterer on the lookout for some bonus of flannel or stew beef or tobacco, yet behind my stately paunch and fancy bib and waistcoat developing, as I advanced into old age, a kind of purse-lipped dignity, known as Uncle Nat, well loved and adoring in return, a palsied stroker of the silken pates of little white grandchildren, rheumatic, illiterate , and filled with sleepiness, half yearning for that lonely death which at long last would lead me to rest in some tumbledown graveyard tangled with chokeberry and jimson weed. —William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 155As if showing off his protagonist's literacy, Styron's verbal pyrotechnics lead us to vocabulary riches such as malingerer , which means "someone who pretends to be sick and thus shirks their duty," not to mention unctuous, meaning "unpleasantly ingratiating," and circumspect, meaning "cautious or heedful of consequences," and other meaty words.
Enough fantastic words, in fact, that we were able to create a 10-word interactive Vocabulary List from just this one sentence. Check it out here: "Words from a Single Sentence in William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner."
Can you find a sentence from literature that does more?
WORD FAMILY malingerer : malingerers+ / malinger : malingered, malingerer, malingering, malingers
USAGE EXAMPLES In GOP dogma, inequality is inevitable and government efforts to balance the scales destroy individual initiative and reward malingerers .
Seattle Times(Nov 12, 2016)
A substance that could “integrate shirkers, malingerers , defeatists and whiners” into the labour market might even be sanctioned.
The Guardian(Sep 25, 2016)
It’s possible your soon-to-be brother-in-law isn’t a malingerer or a manipulator but in genuine distress and without a useful diagnosis.
Slate(May 24, 2016)
n
someone shirking their duty by feigning illness or incapacity Syn | Hyper
shammer, skulker
shirker, slacker
a person who shirks his work or duty (especially one who tries to evade military service in wartime)