Friday Vocabulary

1. feist — mongrel dog; truculent person or animal I wasn’t about to let some little feist ruin everything we’d worked towards for over a year.   2. git — (slang) fool, worthless person “You’d better listen, you git, if you don’t want your face mashed in!”   3. pluricentric — having multiple centers An …

Friday Vocabulary

1. closestool — (also close-stool) stool with hole in its seat, beneath which rests a chamber pot The room he showed me was well-appointed, large enough to have a separate small chamber for the closestool, unlike the mere nook hidden by a curtain I used in my own house.   2. franklin — freeholder of …

Friday Vocabulary

1. subrident — with or accompanied by a smile Professor Harlake spoke to the committee with an air of subrident superiority, as if deigning to respond only to prevent even more misinformed opinions from being promulgated.   2. fane — temple The flowers were heaped on the mound like offerings before a pagan fane.   …

One Hundred and Fifteen Thousand Songs (115,000)

So 57 days after my last thousand songs were heard, I have just listened to my 115,000th unique iTunes track, music familiar to anyone who has sat through David Niven’s turn as the famous British secret agent James Bond. The tune, “Sir James’ Trip To Find Mata”,* is one of Burt Bacharach’s contributions to the …

Friday Vocabulary

1. mizzle — (British) to suddenly depart, to vanish Sure looks like your friend mizzled and left you to pick up the tab.   2. menology — written calendar of saints’ biographies, arranged by each saint’s feast day The conversion of St. Cyriac is only attested in the Greek Menology of Emperor Basil, in which …