1. loathe — to detest, to feel disgust for or towards
I simply loathe the new branding, and don’t even get me started on what they’ve done to the mascot.
2. loath — unwilling, averse, reluctant
Loath as I was to bring the bad news to Elsa, I realized that it was, after all, my painful duty.
3. tomnoddy — fool, dunce; puffin
Now Kelvin may have convinced all the other tomnoddies at the pub with his fancy talk and bold assertions, but he’d have to go a spell further to convince me.
4. ululate — to howl or wail, esp. by alternating loud high-pitched sounds
But at the outskirts of town we were beset by a crowd of ululating termagants who stopped our progress and beset our carriage like a flock of maddened crows attacking a wounded falcon.
5. cumulet — white domesticated pigeon
But Bertha found that he had no love to give her, for his devotions were all to his racing pigeons, and one pretty cumulet in particular, which he had named Laurie.
6. limen — threshold of perception or response
By constant application of this method it was believed that the limen of physical sensitivity to small changes in temperature could be sharpened to mere tenths of a degree, but modern instrument readings of actual nerve responses have cast doubt upon these self-reported successes.
7. milt — fish semen; spleen of a breeding animal
As we flew north along the coastline I could just make out in the sun’s last rays a yellow cloud of milt a mile or so offshore, evidence of the spawning herring our fishing fleet was searching for.
8. belomancy — divination using arrows
Just as the ancient Persian was paralyzed at each crossroads by his bizarre belomancy, trying to scry the future by the fall of arrows, so Lievenpatten became transfixed in his attempts to use the Chinese art of the I Ching, casting his yarrow stalks time after time in some misguided belief that that ancient text would reveal the next correct action, the next choice he must make.
9. commonplace book — personal notebook into which quotes and memoranda were written
But as fascinating as these nostalgic items from fifty years ago were, I was much more interested in what had been written upon the two pages of my uncle’s commonplace book which he’d torn out roughly leaving a jagged remnant upon which I convinced myself I could just make out a few stray letters, suggestive of … well, I wasn’t sure what they were suggestive of.
10. jiggery-pokery — [British] trickery; manipulation
Though nothing was proven, many on The Street believed that Rosen had achieved his immense success through some sort of jiggery-pokery or sharp dealing—though as I say, nothing was ever proven and no person ever came forward to accuse him of any particular act.
Bonus Vocabulary
(San Francisco Bay Area slang)
bip — to steal from a car by smashing a window and taking items left on the seats
Hell, they were just cruising down the avenue, bold as brass, one of ’em hopping out of the Lexus (a Lexus!), checking the window of each parked car, and bipping any that had anything inside.