1. soubise — onion sauce
For this delicate filet an equally delicate soubise is the perfect accompaniment, the sauce also serving to highlight the flavor of the fresh leeks.
2. prescind — to cut off; to separate in thought, to consider apart
But as Peirce points out, one cannot prescind color from space or objects, a consideration which had troubled the ancient School of Names in the time of Confucius.
3. cerise — bright red
For their trip he affected the same nautical look so beloved of L. Ron Hubbard, donning a captain’s cap, blue blazer, and an cerise ascot.
4. avaunt — [archaic] begone, go away
Avaunt thee, vile dog!
5. draughts — [British] checkers
To relieve some of the boredom while we waited for the rescue party to arrive, we fashioned a board and pieces from the ruined suitcase and played game after game of draughts.
6. ladybird — variant for ladybug
Just before I knocked at the door a ladybird alighted on my already outstretched hand, which I took as a sign of good favor for my endeavors.
7. scabrid — rough surfaced
The touch of his scabrid forefinger upon my cheek was almost more than I could stand.
8. susurration — whisper; rustling
Finally the savage fury of the storm abated and the rains ceased, leaving behind an eerie quiet made only more uncanny by the gentle susurration of the dying winds through the eucalyptus overhead.
9. pareidolia — misperception of meaningful patterns where none exist
It’s one thing to see a duck or a rabbit in the clouds, but it’s near lunatic pareidolia to find a message in Morse Code in the random abrasions on your old blue jeans.
10. fetiparous (also foetiparous) — [biology] giving birth before the young are fully developed
One of the advantages of fetiparous marsupials is the reduction of harm to the mother caused by long pregnancies during seasons bereft of food.
Bonus Vocabulary
(British)
curate’s egg — something asserted to be both bad and good, but which is entirely awful
Much though I would like to proclaim this volume of short stories to be a mixed bag, a curate’s egg of fiction, my duty as a reviewer compels me to confess that it is a terrible collection of some of the worst ‘writing’ I have suffered through in years.