1. marcescent — [botany] withered yet still attached
He still felt the pain when he thought of the door slamming his fingers during that drunken escapade, but also felt pride that his marcescent fingernails were still clinging stupidly to his fingertips, just as stubborn as he always was in the face of brute necessity.
2. slope — [British] to go surreptitiously
As soon as Dad turned back to his paper, I sloped out the back door, not wanting to be present when he noticed the broken vase.
3. sorites — [rhetoric] series of propositions or syllogisms where each conclusion becomes the subject of the next
Talking with Nana was like talking to an eight-year-old girl, in that every statement was sure to be followed by “Why?”, like some sort of infinite sorites in which like as not you’d end up with the very statement which had began the series, at which point you could be sure that Nana would once again simply say, “Why?”, though you could never be quite sure whether she noticed the infinite repetition or not.
4. sorb — fruit-bearing deciduous tree of the old world, the service tree; the fruit of this tree
Both the sorb and the medlar ripen only off the tree, and the sorb in particular attains a delicious mellow flavor about a month after being stored up.
5. astragal — anklebone; bead-shaped molding; molding at junction of double doors to prevent drafts
Copies of the astragal (or even the bone itself) were used by children down through the ages to play games similar to dice or jacks.
6. philoprogenitive — prolific, producing (many) offspring; of or relating to love of one’s offspring
Originally constructed as a maternity hospital, with three floors of birthing rooms and eight more of singles and doubles for the new and prospective mothers, this philoprogenitive brick structure had been converted to a more general hospital as the baby boom subsided.
7. pollard — to prune a tree almost back to its trunk so as to produce massed branches
One of the pollarded willows had either been pruned poorly, or had some other deficiency, as its branches seemed thin and dying.
8. cockshut — [obsolete] twilight, evening
Andy planned to move at cockshut time, hoping that the gloaming might hide his movements from the patrols.
9. hent — [obsolete] to seize, to take
This potroon, who the style of king has hent, shall trouble these green hills no more after tomorrow morn.
10. jessie — [UK slang] sissy, coward, effeminate boy or man
“So I told the little jessie if he wanted his money back he could fight me for it, and that’s the last I heard of him, innit?”
11. legicentric — organized around and dedicated to the supremacy of statutes and the law
In the seemingly infinite regulations of the European Union one can see the influence of the French État idéal, the legicentric state where primacy must always be given the the law, even if the rules promulgated have precious little to do with the reality of life as lived by most of its subjects.
Bonus Vocabulary
(French)
en grande tenue — in full dress uniform, in elegant style
Though she may keep a household almost filthy by our standards, this woman of the working class will be seen on a Sunday always en grande tenue, wearing clothes and jewelry that might feed her hungry children for months.