Portent ***

portent



[pawr-tent, pohr-]



Y

D



–noun 

1. an indication 

or 

omen of something about to happen, esp. something momentous. 



2. threatening or disquieting significance: an occurrence of [dire] portent. 

3. a prodigy 

or 

marvel. 



—Synonyms 

1. augury, warning. See sign. 2. import.



Sign, omen, portent name that which gives evidence of a future event. 



Sign is a general word for whatever gives evidence of an event—past, present, or future: Dark clouds are a sign of rain or snow. 



An omen is an augury or warning of things to come; it is used only of the future, in general, as good or bad: birds of evil omen. 



Portent, limited, like omen, to prophecy of the future, may be used of a specific event, usually a misfortune: portents of [war]. 





C

portentous, pretentious (adjs.) 

 

Portentous has three meanings: "forecasting evil or unpleasantness," "striking awe or amazing," and "ponderous or pompous." 



It is this last sense that slightly overlaps pretentious, which means "claiming unjustified importance or standing," "being ostentatious.” 



The main distinction is that a portentous man just might be as important as he seems, but a pretentious one cannot be as important as he claims. 



Portentious (also sometimes portenteous) is Substandard, a misspelling (and mispronunciation) of portentous.





　

"Burn After Reading" has plenty of [momentum]—short, tight-knit scenes of people arguing, driving, screwing, fighting—and, if you listen hard, you may hear echoes of a portentous old Capitol Hill drama like "Advise and Consent." 



But those echoes are stifled by a farce plot so bleak and unfunny that it freezes your responses after about forty-five minutes. The characters—Washington types, in and out of government—are all egotists who think they know how the world works yet miss the most obvious signals. 



They throw themselves into adultery but get little pleasure out of it, not even the excitement of betrayal. The one person who falls truly in love gets nowhere. The Coens dramatize their point of view in a brief scene in which 



John Malkovich’s Osborne Cox, an irascible, Princeton-educated C.I.A. analyst 



who has been [canned] for drinking, [un]burdens himself to his father. The two are sitting on Osborne’s yacht. The father, however, has had a stroke and can’t respond. No one in the movie responds to anyone else. 



irascible

–adjective 

1. easily provoked to anger; very irritable: an irascible old man. 

2. characterized 

or 

produced by anger: an irascible response.  





ulterior (consealed, future) 

prescient 

augur prognosticate harbinger 



bespeak

Rose's petulant theatrics don't bespeak the [perils] of boundary-free parenting so much as a mental disorder, or a coarse [screenplay]

to bespeak a [seat] in a theater. 

[This] bespeaks a kindly heart.

Threnody