Friday Vocabulary

1. draegerman — specially trained miner who is expert in underground rescue

The boisterous draegermen, still prideful after their success at the Slewton Slide, kept teasing the old miner at the end of the bar.

 

2. ted — to spread out or to strew for drying

As the orange sun cast its parting rays upon the newly mown field where the tedded hay still lay ready for gathering on the morrow, Bealiah wondered how his sister could ever think of leaving their heavenly homestead.

 

3. rhombencephalon — hindbrain

The student will soon discover that the separate parts of the rhombencephalon are not always easily distinguishable when working with lizard brains.

 

4. absquatulate — to flee, to abscond, to leave hurriedly or secretly

The plan was simplicity itself, though only such backwoods fools would give money to complete strangers and not expect them to absquatulate the moment their purses were full of the local specie.

 

5. pantophobic — fearful of everything

As easy as it might be to lapse into a pantophobic nihilistic despair, we must resist the urge and pick ourselves up each day, steeling ourselves for the evil which sometimes seems much more than sufficient for any twenty-four hour time period.

 

6. gaylord (also gaylord box) — large and rugged cardboard box for shipping and storage

At the end of almost a full week of intensive work we accumulated over fifteen gaylords of recyclable material extracted from the tumbledown woods behind the once beautiful mansion.

 

7. morse — (archaic) walrus

The oldest among them, a weather-beaten man whom all the others living in these rude huts assured us was the fiercest hunter of morse, declared emphatically that the morse had no horn at all upon its brow, though he allowed that the sea beast had very dangerous tusks and teeth.

 

8. arpent — old French unit of area roughly equal to an acre, still used in Francophone America

The sons were no wiser than Descaux père, fighting endlessly over a dozen worthless arpents of swampland while the lawyer’s fees ate away both the profit and the capital of the old sugar plantation.

 

9. adversion — (obsolete) attention

Just as when our mind’s eye in a dream begins to wake the moment we focus our adversion upon the peculiar narrative of the dream, so has she lost interest in each suitor from the time she first deigns to notice him and his plaint.

 

10. cosher — to feast; to pamper

Many a vassal finds his stores insufficient for the winter after the lord of the manor comes to cosher for a long weekend’s hunt.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(grammar)

sentence adverb — adverb modifying entire content of a sentence

Though debates still burble about whether ‘hopefully’ is acceptable as a sentence adverb, the wisest course whenever considering a sentence adverb is this: Don’t.

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