1. Pillar to post
• If someone goes from pillar to post, they are forced to keep moving from one place to another.
Usage: My parents were always on the move and so my childhood was spent being dragged from pillar to post.
2. Antigraft
• Opposed to or designed to reduce corruption.
• Graft, as understood in American English, is a form of political corruption, being the unscrupulous use of a politician’s authority for personal gain. Similarly, political graft occurs when funds intended for public projects are intentionally misdirected in order to maximize the benefits to private interests.
Usage: Antigraft agency is a special police agency specialised in fighting political corruption and engaging in general anti-corruption activities.
3. Undertow
• An implicit quality, emotion, or influence underlying the superficial aspects of something and leaving a particular impression.
Usage: There’s a dark undertow of loss that links the novel with earlier works.
4. Flout
• Openly disregard a rule, law, or convention. To scorn or show contempt for.
Usage: Animal rights advocates say that the journeys are often too long, regulations aren’t up to scratch and the rules are often flouted.
5. Malady
• A disease or ailment.
Usage: Mac’s Mission, which specializes in animals with unique maladies, said it found the pup wandering the chilly streets of Jackson, Mo., with an injured paw.
• A serious problem.
Usage: He’s slowly making a composite picture of the maladies afflicting American society.
6. Downbeat
• Pessimistic or gloomy.
Usage: The downbeat mood on Wall Street on Friday carried over into Monday’s trading.
7. Impinge
• Have an effect, especially a negative one.
Usage: Several factors impinge on market efficiency.
• Advance over an area belonging to someone or something else.
• Encroach.
Usage: The proposed fencing would impinge on a public bridleway.
8. Whistle-blower
• A whistle-blower is a person who exposes secretive information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within a private or public organization.
• In India, Whistle Blowers Protection Act, 2014 is an Act in the Parliament of India which provides a mechanism to investigate alleged corruption and misuse of power by public servants and also protect anyone who exposes alleged wrongdoing in government bodies, projects and offices.
9. Reflate
• Expand the level of output of an economy by government stimulus, using either fiscal or monetary policy.
Usage: Western states pressured Schmidt to reflate the West German economy faster.
• Reflation is the act of stimulating the economy by increasing the money supply or by reducing taxes, seeking to bring the economy back up to the long-term trend, following a dip in the business cycle. It is the opposite of disinflation, which seeks to return the economy back down to the long-term trend.
10. Dialect levelling
• Dialect levelling is the process of an overall reduction in the variation or diversity of features in one or more dialects. Typically, this comes about through assimilation, mixture, and merging of certain dialects, often by language standardization.
• It has been observed in most languages with large numbers of speakers after industrialisation and modernisation of the areas in which they are spoken.
