1. Nitty-Gritty
• The most important aspects or practical details of a subject or situation.
Usage: Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of Budget 2019.
Synonyms: basics, essentials, essence.
2. Couplet
• A couplet is a pair of successive lines of metre in poetry. A couplet usually consists of two successive lines that rhyme and have the same length.
• A couplet may be formal or run-on. In a formal couplet, each of the two lines is end-stopped, implying that there is a grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse.
3. Digress
• Leave the main subject temporarily in speech or writing.
Usage: After the election season, thee Center has digressed a little from their manifesto.
Synonyms: deviate, go off at a tangent, and diverge.
4. Fetish
• A form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc.
Usage: A man with a fetish for surgical masks.
Synonyms: fixation, sexual fixation, obsession, compulsion, mania.
5. Purveyor
• A person or group who spreads or promotes an idea, view, etc.
Usage: The first and perhaps most difficult to define was the academy’s role as purveyor of moral virtue.
6. Crescendo
• The loudest point reached in a gradually increasing sound.
Usage: The port engine’s sound rose to a crescendo.
• The highest point reached in a progressive increase of intensity.
Usage: The hysteria reached a crescendo around the spring festival.
7. Call the shots
• Take the initiative in deciding how something should be done.
Usage: Directors call the shots and nothing happens on set without their say-so.
8. Straw that broke the camel’s back
• The idiom “the straw that broke the camel’s back”, alluding to the proverb “it is the last straw that breaks the camel’s back”, describes the seemingly minor or routine action that causes an unpredictably large and sudden reaction, because of the cumulative effect of small actions.
Usage: It felt like everything was going wrong this morning, and the straw that broke the camel’s back was when I accidentally spilled my cereal on the floor.
9. Intrusive
• Causing disruption or annoyance through being unwelcome or uninvited.
Usage: They found the television cameras too intrusive.
10. Overture
• Overture in music was originally the instrumental introduction to a ballet, opera, or oratorio in the 17th century.
11. Rapprochement
• A rapprochement, which comes from the French word rapprocher, is a re-establishment of cordial relations between two countries.
Usage: There now seems little chance of rapprochement between the warring factions.
