1. toerag (also toe-rag) — [British colloquial] worthless or despicable person; vagrant
But I’m not about to be made to feel guilty by some toerag whose problems are all his own.
2. noddle — [British] the head
This job’s not a very good use of your fine old noddle, now is it?
3. reredorter — privy in medieval monastery
I made my way through the steady rain to the reredorter, where it seemed all of the brethren had gathered, perhaps upset in the same way I had been by the cook’s daunting stew.
4. pomo — [slang] postmodern
And then Fincham-Smythe came out with some pomo Marxist twaddle that I thought we’d all said good riddance to when the new millennium arrived.
5. sucket fork — eating utensil with spoon bowl on one end of the stem and two- or three-tined fork on the other, used for eating sweetmeats
It seems strange that the fork was the last of our three primary pieces of silverware to come into common use, with only specialized versions before our modern era—such as the sucket fork beloved by the Tudors—but earlier eaters were quite content to use their fingers for most of the purposes we put our forks to.
6. malapert — impudent, overly saucy
I’ll take no such words from a malapert serving wench who no better knows her place than to take such umbrage at the master’s will.
7. sobriquet — nickname
His sobriquet, “the Petty”, derived from the possibly apocryphal account of the would-be king’s dunning of his tax collectors with questions about every divergence from projected revenues, to the point where his finance minister, the Bishop Polprêtre, resigned (or rather, attempted to resign) in pretended disgust.
8. criminator — [archaic] accuser, calumniator
Thus did my own feelings become criminators against my own spouse, so troubled had I been by the knowing looks and diffident words of my fellows.
9. veronica — bullfighting pass in which matador swings his muleta before the bull while keeping his legs perfectly still
With a passable veronica I grabbed the boy off his bike just as it passed in its pell-mell descent and held him safely as his vehicle flew into and over the railing just on the other side of the roadway, to fall in an agony of metal and rubber onto the rocks below.
10. groat — very old English coin of silver, worth four pennies
Though the groat was taken from circulation in the 17th Century, it is still minted as one of the Maundy coins.
Bonus Vocabulary
(derogatory military slang)
Rupert — junior officer
He had the serene self-confidence and total lack of situational awareness that epitomized most of the Sandhurst Ruperts I had contact with during that sweltering summer campaign.