Friday Vocabulary

1. beetle — to overhang, to project; to hang over with menace

Try as I might, I could not completely ignore the beetling mounds of paper precariously perched upon the shelves of the boarder’s salon or bedroom, which mounds threatened to fall upon us every time we inadvertently jostled the furniture.

  2. cattywampus — arranged incorrectly or diagonally; askew

After we spent two hours wrestling the donated couch up the stairs and into the loft we realized that it made the whole space cattywampus, ’cause you couldn’t fit any of the small tables at the ends of the couch and there was a big empty corner left behind it in the room; it just wouldn’t fit any other way.

  3. keratometer — device used for measuring curvature of cornea, principally to assess astigmatism

However, the keratometer assumes that the eyeball — well, the cornea — is a perfect sphere, though that is not true.

  4. pinniped — of or relating to the order of aquatic carnivorous mammals which includes seals and walruses

Bill turned and ran from the charging pinniped, finally realizing that he had intruded into the huge sea lion’s private breeding grounds.

  5. dyspnea — difficulty breathing

Her complaints of chest pains coupled with her obvious dyspnea made me suspect a collapsed lung.

  6. sapiential — having wisdom

Job is one of the seven sapiential books of the bible (though only five appear in the usual Protestant editions), so called because they deal principally with the wisdom of sages.

  7. wheal — small, reddened swelling of the skin, usually circular and often accompanied with burning or itching

Before the varicella vaccine reduced the occurrence of chicken pox to merely one tenth of its previous spread, parents frequently had to place mittens on their small children’s hands to keep those toddlers from scratching furiously at the itchy wheals that broke out on their face and torso.

  8. declension — inflection of nouns, pronouns, or adjectives through various cases and numbers

Fortunately we no longer have to worry about the dual number once used in earlier Proto-Indo-European descendants, so the declension for most modern European languages only requires learning the rules for singular and plural numbers.

  9. frowzy — musty, bad smelling; slatternly, unkempt

The squat woman’s frowzy hair resembled nothing so more as a recently abandoned rat’s nest.

  10. asthenia — debility, lack of strength

Sighing mournfully upon the fainting couch, she exhibited an asthenia which was either an effect of her bird-like appetite or an affect of her predilection for 19th-Century German Romanticism.