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 American high school has a pluricentric social structure, in which the so-called student government usually has the least influence.
4. cadastre — property register used as basis for taxation
Whereas the highland entries are usually so vague as to be useless to the researcher, the lake property records in the county cadastre have proven to be an excellent source for details about the main landed families in the region, revealing their financial ups and downs through the purchases, sales, and transfers of the fertile farms of the valley.
5. jorum — large drinking-bowl
He promised to tell us the whole story, but swore that not a word of it would pass his lips before he had assuaged his thirst with a jorum of wine.
6. equipartition — division into equal parts; equal contribution to total energy by each form of a system
Here, once again, we see the superiority of nature to man, for the entirety of the system’s kinetic energy is governed by the iron rules of equipartition, whereas men can rarely share equally even a single pizza pie.
7. euphuistic — high-flown, overly ornate style in speech or writing
While most occupants of the executive suite claim to disdain a euphuistic style, preferring what they pretend is a realistic and “businesslike” mode of expression, the fact is that if all their buzzwords, jargon, and pompous phrases were removed, most of their speech would be reduced to “We did a thing” or “We are thinking of doing a thing” or “Maybe we shouldn’t do this thing”.
8. heptarchy — government by seven rulers; the seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England extant during the latter half of the first millennium AD (often capitalized)
Such slavish obeisance to brutal overlords has not been seen since the days of the Heptarchy.
9. carking — (archaic) worrisome, distressful
Somehow the very means developed by supposedly scientific men to free us from carking care have become stressors worse than the worries they were meant to cure.
10. mens rea — (Latin) criminal intent, mental knowledge of wrongdoing which forms part of some crimes
Although ignorance is no defense, as the truism states, the court found that his illness left the major incapable of the mens rea necessary to find him guilty for his actions.