1. bucranium — [architecture] sculpted ox skull used as decoration
Though we can trace the bucrania found at Monticello and the University of Virginia to a frieze depicted in Les Édifices Antiques de Rome by Desgodetz, the decorative use of such skulls and horns has been dated back at least as far as the neolithic site of Çatalhöyük.
2. witter — [British] to talk on and on about pointless things
I left Mrs. Funderson wittering on about the latest malfeasance of the milkman and rushed out the door.
3. pixilated — mentally bewildered, eccentric
We had a lengthy discussion about the relative merits of Vatican II and the proper method of inserting a padded inner sole into a deep boot, and all the while I had no idea that this somewhat pixilated though kindly gentleman was one of the most important lecturers on the new ‘new’ “New Mathematics”, the discoverer of Bathy-Zienman Space Functions, with all that that implies.
4. tare — [obsolete] past tense of the verb “to tear”
And as he tare the meat from the roast, a fell wind arose and extinguished his torch.
5. anodyne — pain-relieving; soothing; inoffensive, bland
I found something about his anodyne reassurances about the development project somehow quite disturbing.
6. theodicy — vindication of divinity in the face of worldly evils
But Mather’s “Sinners In The Hands Of An Angry God” is no theodicy, is no apology for the ineffable nature of God, but instead places all the blame for evil squarely upon the shoulders and the soul of man and his wicked, wicked ways.
7. beetlehead — dolt
It suffices for most beetleheads to hear the same story repeated once or twice for them to assume that it must be true.
8. caitiff — base wretch, despicable or pitiful person
“No!” cried Sir Henry, “no, allow the caitiff to speak, if he can stand on his own two weak legs before this haughty company.”
9. reify — to make an abstract or mental thing more concrete or real
The near-infinite promise of the interconnected World Wide Web as promulgated by the breathless ‘reportage’ of Wired and Mondo 2000 has been reified as a society of persons who spend almost fifty percent of their time staring at flat screens of pixels, ‘living their best lives’.
10. crawfish — [idiom] to back out from a commitment or position
If you’re going to do it, just do it, without all this crawfishing and second-guessing yourself.
Bonus Vocabulary
(British informal)
faff — to waste or spend time in useless activity; to dither
He got all his tools sorted, explaining the purpose of each one, and how it might—or might not—help in our particular circumstances, with several digressions upon the inner workings of the internal combustion engine and its history, with particular attention to recent and startling advances made in the past two decades, and by this time he stopped faffing and was prepared to actually work upon the car, the engine had cooled sufficiently so that it started right up and I drove off, leaving him standing there to put all his tools away in the boot of his Land Rover.