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"boosting"

By Richard Nordquist, About.com

Definition:

An adverbial construction used to support a claim or express a viewpoint more assertively and convincingly.

Etymology:

Perhaps from dialectal boostering, "bustling, active"

Examples:

  • "Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."
    (Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey)


  • "All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost, the most legitimate passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one."
    (Marquis De Sade)


  • "The history of England is emphatically the history of progress."
    (Thomas Babington Macaulay)


  • "Without doubt, machinery has greatly increased the number of well-to-do idlers."
    (Karl Marx)


  • "Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will."
    (Virginia Woolf)


  • "Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."
    (H. L. Mencken)


  • "All government, of course, is against liberty."
    (H. L. Mencken)


  • "The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible, no matter whether it is on a section gang, a football field, in an army, or in an office."
    (President Dwight Eisenhower)


  • "I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer."
    (Woody Allen)


  • "People who get nostalgic about childhood were obviously never children."
    (Bill Watterson)

Pronunciation: BOOST-ingAudio Link

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