The Articulate Professional online!

- Invigorating and expanding your communications skills
For a more successful, fulfilling life ** Since 1993

Pusillanimous

printer friendly format

(pronounced pyoo-suh-lan-uh-mus; "oo" pronounced as in "boot" and not as in "book")  adjective

Definition

lacking courage; cowardly; showing timidity or absence of resolution; characterized by contemptible faintheartedness.

Other Forms

Pusillanimity  (pronounced pyoo-suh-luh-nim-ih-tee)  noun

Main Example

• "A Nation Of Wusses: How America's Leaders Lost The Guts To Make Us Great" is the title of a book that has been getting a lot of coverage in the media lately. Written by former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a Democrat, the book rightly lays blame for our nation's many burning problems to the timidity and pusillanimity of the leading politicians in both major political parties.

Workplace Examples

• It is our manager's cowardliness, his pusillanimity that bugs me. He makes all these promises during employee meetings, yet he fails to mention even one of them when he meets with senior management.
• There is mounting evidence that manmade global warming presents perhaps the gravest threat to the lives and well-being of not just lower and middle class Americans but also of billions of others on this planet. Yet, true to tradition, lawmakers in Washington D.C. have been pusillanimous, refusing to voice solutions that might be unpopular with their voter base.

Other Examples

• this author telling someone: "Do you remember that during the anarchy that prevailed in Baghdad shortly after the U.S. invasion in 2003, there was massive looting of Iraq's National Museum? And the entire world was stunned to learn that numerous ancient vases and other invaluable specimens belonging to the Mesopotamian civilization had been stolen? Well, soon after that museum's shocked director lamented publicly about this staggering loss, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was educated at Princeton, mind you, scoffed at the museum's claims during a press conference, saying laughingly that at best the museum possessed one or two vases and what of it. And what might you ask was the reaction of his audience--many of whom, too, were educated at elite institutions--at this insult to mankind's patrimony? They just sat pusillanimously, some even joining Rumsfeld in his misguided laughter. Not a single one of those men and women was ballsy enough to challenge the secretary. It was a despicable sight. Besides, it smacked of totalitarianism!"
• during Enron's heyday, its executives glaring down any Wall Street analyst who dared ask tough and probing questions instead of pusillanimously accepting management's word at face value
• for the past several years, as the trade imbalance between U.S. and China has soared in the latter's favor, whichever party is in opposition in the House and U.S. Senate accusing the White House of having a pusillanimous policy with regard to trade with the Asian giant
• It's been weeks since the nation's worst ever massacre--the shootings in Aurora, Colorado--when a masked gunman fired some sixty bullets in about a minute, yet there has not been so much as a peep from our pusillanimous members of Congress on the singular issue of why anyone should be allowed to possess a clip that can hold more than, say, ten bullets.

© 2014 V.J. Singal
No part of this may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the author.

This Month's Other Words

To help you sharply enhance your vocabulary

The Articulate Professional -- 3rd Edition
Click here for features and sample pages, or place an order.

Copyright © 1999 - 2014 by V.J. Singal. Articulate is a registered trademark.
Questions or comments may be sent directly to the author.
Phone: 281-463-2500, P.O. Box 841155, Houston, TX 77284-1155