velvet

1. (cooking) To coat raw meat in starch, then in oil, preparatory to frying.Examples: "Blanching cut and specially marinated chicken in oil or water prior to stir-frying is a technique common to Chinese restaurant kitchens. The 20-second bath tenderizes the chicken remarkably, hence the process has been dubbed "velveting" in English. Velveted chicken is half-cooked, will not stick to the pan, and needs almost no oil when stir-fried."

2. (figurative, transitive) To soften; to mitigate.Examples: "She spoke very gently, full of compassion for the boy, velveting her reproach for me."figurativelytransitive

3. (of a cat's claws) to retract.

1. (politics) Peaceful; carried out without violence; especially as pertaining to the peaceful breakup of Czechoslovakia.Examples: "What at the time of the initial agreement of Yeltsin, Shushkevich and Kravchuk to join together in a new 'Commonwealth of Independent States' had seemed like a reconstitution of the lands of ancient Rus, quickly turned out to be, in the words of the leading Russian-Ukrainian reformer Aleksandr Tsipko, merely a 'velvet disintegration'."; "The disintegration always took place within internal borders, whether it was velvet, as in the case of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, or bloody, like Yugoslavia's still unfinished break-up."; "If the Sudanese can resolve the final steps in a velvet divorce and move in a more democratic direction, that will serve as a heartening "ideal model of change" […]"