Friday Vocabulary

1. recreant — coward, craven; apostate, traitor

You have shown yourself recreant before all assembled here, false to your duty and false to your word.

  2. pruritus — itching, esp. with no visible cause

Of course, pruritus may manifest itself when merely mentioned, much in the manner of certain allergies.

  3. fremescent — murmuring, increasingly noisy

Our lazy reverie upon the sleepy river was interrupted by a fremescent sound like distant thunder, which we finally realized came from a dangerous set of rapids athwart our course.

  4. barratry — misconduct by ship’s master or crew against the interest of the shipowner

Joe and Bob got the captain good and drunk, locked him in his cabin, and then sailed the rusty tub to the Sandoval Islands where they sold the ship for scrap, adding barratry to their earlier mutiny.

  5. haplopia — normal eyesight

In Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian short story “Harrison Bergeron”, the eponymous protagonist is forced to wear distorting lenses to ‘handicap’ him for his haplopia.

  6. vigneron — wine-grower

The Georgia colony during the days of Oglethorpe was fortunate to have the services of the Jewish vigneron and physician, Samuel Nunes.

  7. obus — artillery shell

Making his way past the barbed wire and the obus, skirting the foxholes and the shell craters, he carried the kitten cradled within his gas mask bag towards the one remaining patch of greenery on the horizon.

  8. hundredweight — weighing one hundred pounds; (British) weighing 112 pounds

Completely filled after the torrential rains, the 30-gallon bin carried two-and-a-half hundredweight of water, making it impossible to move until drained.

  9. morbific — causing disease

Though your mother’s exhortation to bundle up lest you catch a cold has merit, the freezing weather has no morbific effect, rather its danger lies in the lessened resistance it imparts to your immune system.

  10. discectomy — cutting out part or all of a spinal disc

Though he had tried to remain hopeful, he was pleased beyond all measure by how immediately the discectomy relieved all the pain he had been enduring for the past six months.