Perhaps the problem is just that we are not both speaking the same English?
Does this help:
re·fus·al Pronunciation (r-fyzl)
n.
1. The act or an instance of refusing.
2. The opportunity or right to accept or reject something before it is offered elsewhere.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
References in classic literature:
Collins, with a formal wave of the hand, that it is usual with young ladies to reject the addresses of the man whom they secretly mean to accept, when he first applies for their favour; and that sometimes the refusal is repeated a second, or even a third time.
Pride and Prejudice by Austen, Jane
I think perhaps I should have made a show of the indignation I really felt, and I am sure that Colonel MacAndrew at least would have thought well of me if I had been able to report my stout refusal to sit at the same table with a man of such character.
Moon and Sixpence by Maugham, W. Somerset
REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired; as an elderly maiden's hand in marriage, to a rich and handsome suitor; a valuable franchise to a rich corporation, by an alderman; absolution to an impenitent king, by a priest, and so forth. Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists the refusal assentive.
The Devil's Dictionary by Bierce, Ambrose |
