Proselytize & Proselyte ***

proselytize







Y

[pros-uh-li-tahyz]



D



–verb (used with object), verb (used without object) 

to convert 

or 

attempt to convert as a proselyte; recruit. 



Also, especially British, proselytise.





C



proselyte, proselytize (vv.)   

 

These verbs are exact synonyms, the first the result of functional shift from the noun proselyte, the second made by adding the -ize suffix to the noun. 



Both mean "to attempt to recruit or convert someone to your group, movement, religion, or other belief." Americans seem to use proselytize more frequently, perhaps because the suffix makes its part-of-speech designation unmistakable.    





　

Nothing howls [out] for a good, steel-tipped satiric whipping like modern American evangelism—the public discourse is so poisoned with cant about sin, "religious correctness," warmongers praying for corpse-heaped victory, 



and faith-for-faith's-sake proselytizing that Mark Twain could've worn a million pencils down to stubs and still not exhaust his say. 



But Twain didn't write screenplays. How can mass entertainment, with so much demographic pandering [on] its agenda, lampoon Yankee self-holiness—



that viscous stew of naïveté, insecure leader-lust, psychotic self-righteousness, and medieval imbecility?



viscous

–adjective 

1. of a glutinous nature or consistency; sticky; thick; adhesive.

2. having the property of viscosity. 



Also, viscose. 



mortar

plaster

and there is a Wall of Shame [plastered] with the photos of the girls back home who have dumped them.  

gelatinous

The leaves are covered with gelatinous [ooze]. Whatever the trouble is, it's everywhere.

Smock





sabbatical

heresy

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys [waxes] nostalgic for the far more innocent church scandal of teenage [heresy]. 

schism

East-West Schism or The Great Schism

as it examines the heartbreaking [schism] in the relationship between Frank and April Wheeler. 

Hierophant