Friday Vocabulary

1. nous — mind, reason; common sense “Use your nous, Shelly!” the captain said, “Place the pickets up on the ridge, not the tents!”   2. mesclun — salad of mixed young greens The agency claimed that a pre-packaged mesclun mix was implicated in the outbreak, but this was denied by the distributor.   3. …

Friday Vocabulary

1. balestra (also ballestra) — [fencing] leap towards opponent with an immediate lunge Dimitrios closed the distance with a balestra feint to the sword arm shoulder, followed by an imbroccata to the chest, and Gregorio was hard-pressed to keep the Greek from ending the fight then and there.   2. pediophobia — fear of dolls …

Friday Vocabulary

1. recrudescence — reappearance, renewed outbreak, reoccurrence (esp. of something morbid or bad) This recrudescence of simony, however, left most strata of society unconcerned, couched in this somewhat disingenuous language of sympathy.   2. chirality — asymmetry of chemical compounds which cannot be superimposed upon its mirror image, ‘handedness’ The discovery of chirality among quarks, …

Friday Vocabulary

1. turpitude — vileness, inherent wickedness If you insist on demonstrating your turpitude before me, I shall have to absent myself, to take a turn or two abovedeck and try to erase these sights from my memory.   2. superlunary — celestial or heavenly as opposed to worldly Maimonides here points out that, though human …

Friday Vocabulary

1. blench — to flinch, to quail Do not stare at me so, lest I blench under your steely gaze that I would rather looked lovingly upon my face.   2. conation — mental facility directed towards striving, will, desire, volition Reichholz claimed that an internal focus upon conation had unintended negative consequences, that the …

Friday Vocabulary

1. Quinquagesima — final Sunday before Lent, beginning of Carnival The first appearance of Quinquagesima as a pre-Lenten feast (there is some evidence for the term being used for an anticipatory fast) cannot be found in Italy earlier than the 6th Century.   2. bimble — [British] to walk about in a meandering way with …

Friday Vocabulary

1. super — [informal] supernumerary I thought those NPCs were just supers in the adventure after the opening, so I didn’t bring their characters sheets or figures with me for this session.   2. desuetude — disuse, discontinuance of practice His words came croaking and halting, as if his very power of speech had fallen …