mindmap root((AB/ABS)) abscond To depart in secret and hide.
🌱They discovered the next morning that their guest had absconded with most of the silverware during the night. 🌳Wagner's massive four-part opera The Ring of the Nibelung begins with a dwarf absconding with gold which he turns into a magic ring. And in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins absconds from Gollum's caves with the ring he has found, the ring Gollum calls "my precious"; what follows is detailed in the three-volume Lord of the Rings. （Tolkien knew Wagner's opera well.） A young couple might abscond from their parents to get married, but sooner or later they must face those parents again. abstemious Restrained, especially in the consumption of food or alcohol.
🌱Her parents had left her two million dollars when they died, having been so abstemious for years that their neighbors all assumed they were poor. 🌳Many 14th-century monks lived by the Rule of St. Benedict, which demands an abstemious life of obedience and poverty. But not all monks could maintain such abstemious habits. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales contains a portrait of a fat monk who is supposed to follow a vegetarian diet but instead is an enthusiastic hunter who loves a juicy swan best. He justifies breaking the Rule by saying that it's old-fashioned and that he's just keeping up with modern times. Abstemious itself has a slightly old-fashioned sound today, especially in a country where everyone is constantly encouraged to consume. abstraction The consideration of a thing or idea without associating it with a particular example.
🌱All the ideas she came up with in class were abstractions, since she had no experience of actual nursing at all. 🌳From its roots, abstraction should mean basically "something pulled or drawn away." So abstract art is art that has moved away from painting objects of the ordinary physical world in order to show something beyond it. Theories are often abstractions; so a theory about economics, for instance, may "pull back" to take a broad view that somehow explains all of economics （but maybe doesn't end up explaining any of it very successfully）. An abstract of a medical or scientific article is a one-paragraph summary of its contents—that is, the basic findings "pulled out" of the article. abstruse Hard to understand; deep or complex.
🌱In every class he fills the blackboard with abstruse calculations, and we usually leave more confused than ever. 🌳The original meaning of abstruse, coming almost straight from the Latin, was "concealed, hidden." It's easy to see how the word soon came to describe the kind of language used by those who possess certain kinds of expert knowledge （and don't necessarily want to share it with other people）. Scientific writing is often filled with the kind of abstruse special vocabulary that's necessary for exact and precise descriptions. Unfortunately, the language of a science like quantum physics can make an already difficult subject even more abstruse to the average person.