1. Exoneration
• The action of officially absolving someone from blame; vindication.
Usage: Daniel represented more than 20 people in legal proceedings that led to their exoneration or release from prison.
2. Commission of Inquiry
• A commission of inquiry is one of many bodies available to the government to inquire into various issues.
• Commissions report findings, give advice and make recommendations. While their findings are not legally binding, they can be highly influential.
• Commissions of inquiry are independent of the government.
Usage: As an expert witness, he submitted a 50- page criticism of the operation to the official commission of inquiry.
3. Untoward
• Unexpected and inappropriate or inconvenient.
Usage: Both tried to behave as if nothing untoward had happened.
4. Carnage
• The killing of a large number of people.
Usage: The bombing was timed to cause as much carnage as possible.
5. Amicus curiae
• An amicus curiae is someone who is not a party to a case and may or may not have been solicited by a party and who assists a court by offering information, expertise, or insight that has a bearing on the issues in the case; and is typically presented in the form of a brief.
Usage: The GOP bill would mandate that amicus curiae – an impartial court advisor – be assigned to all cases where a U.S. person is involved.
6. Incommensurate
• Out of keeping or proportion with.
Usage: Man’s influence on the earth’s surface seems incommensurate with his scale.
7. Jus sanguinis
• Jus sanguinis is a principle of nationality law by which citizenship is determined or acquired by the nationality or ethnicity of one or both parents.
Usage: Germany, like many European states, subscribes to the idea of “jus sanguinis”, where citizenship is determined by the nationalities of one or both parents but not by one’s place of birth.
8. Jus soli
• Jus soli, commonly referred to as birth right citizenship in the United States, is the right of anyone born in the territory of a state to nationality or citizenship.
Usage: Under the principle of jus soli — the right of the soil — being born in Canada confers automatic citizenship.
9. Sift out
• To remove something that you do not want from a substance by putting it through a sieve
• To separate something, usually something you do not want, from a group of things
Usage: We need to sift out the applications that have no chance of succeeding.
10. Morphology
• Morphology is the study of how things are put together, like the make-up of animals and plants.
• In linguistics, morphology is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyses the structure of words and parts of words, such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes.
Usage: As kids progress, they’ll discover words’ Greek and Latin roots, and learn how to pronounce, spell and predict the meaning of a word they’ve never seen before based on its morphology, or form.
