Educated Guesswork

1. indurate — to harden; to make callous; to inure

Yet this same experience which had left me an unrepentant criminal had not indurated Wilfred’s heart and soul.

 

2. parterre — ornamental flower beds; rear section of main floor in an auditorium

All these delectable vegetables were surrounded by rows of shrubbery, beyond which stood a stone statue of a young girl, atop a small bird bath, which had a small circular parterre of carnations and daisies around its base, perhaps planted by the very girl in question.

 

3. vaunt — boast

But he immediately regretted his vaunt as the lighter which he swore had never once failed to light, failed to light.

 

4. distemper — to paint with distemper, a paint using glue or size instead of oil as base; [British] to whitewash

The workmen were busily distempering the exposed roof beams, blending the most notable feature of the cottage insensibly into the ugly white stucco interior walls.

 

5. noctuary — record of incidents which happen at night, journal of nocturnal happenings

So terrible were those hours, days, weeks, months within that fetid dungeon that no diary, but only a noctuary would be suitable to record their horrors.

 

6. drugget — coarse hair rug; coarse felted or woven woolen fabric

Traces of arsenic were found in the weave of the drugget in the girl’s bedroom, though of course any member of the household had access to that room during the day.

 

7. freeboard — distance between waterline and topmost waterproof deck on a ship

The low freeboard of the monitor ships made them a difficult target for cannon, but that same feature also made them very unseaworthy and suitable only for riverine use.

 

8. ogive — [statistics] graph of cumulative distribution function; [architecture] roundly pointed arch, rib supporting such an arch

When comparing the sex-specific ogives of drug response broken down by age, the researchers noticed a strange plateau among males of between 25 and 45 years of age, which led them to the discovery of the new epigenetic pathway we are still investigating to this day.

 

9. pulmotor — trademarked cycling resuscitator developed in 1907

She has recovered from her boating accident, but only regained consciousness after four hours use of the pulmotor.

 

10. forehanded — prudent; resilient

I never thought my cousin a forehanded man, but Ned somehow managed to save enough to buy the farm outright.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(idiom)

make a pig’s ear of — to botch, to make a mess of

I was too proud to ask for help, and I made a pig’s ear of the job from start to finish.

(Cockney slang)

pig’s ear — beer

“Ned, on your way back from the khazi, grab me a pig’s ear.”

1. doolally — [informal British] out of one’s head, temporarily non compos mentis

“You see, George went a bit doolally after losing last night, and he’s burnt the whole game, box and all.”

 

2. thurifer — acolyte carrying the thurible

We first began to suspect that something was wrong with the thurifer when the young lad swung his censer directly into the flowered hat of old Mrs. Partimbeke, knocking off the gaudy headwear in a cloud of smoke and ash.

 

3. maculate — to spot or stain, to defile

The once pristine shopping mall had been maculated by pop-up cellular service stands, noodle and pizza vendors, and abandoned spaces where once proud anchor stores had reigned.

 

4. adventitious — accidental, supervenient, extrinsic

Perhaps what we think of as the supreme glories of civilization are merely the adventitious consequences of an evolutionary mistake, the accidental byproducts of a self-consciousness which has yet to prove its ultimate value.

 

5. triolet — eight-line poem having rhyme scheme abaaabab with 1st line repeated as the 4th and 7th lines, and the 2nd as the 8th

Suddenly he realized that his back and forth with the customer service rep formed a sort of misshapen triolet, and he had the thought that if poetry could be found on the complaint line to Frito-Lay, perhaps it truly could be found everywhere.

 

6. supercargo — merchant ship’s officer in charge of the cargo and its sale

Truth be told, when I allowed my nephew to ship out as supercargo of the Bain Marie, I had little hope that he would do more than break even on the voyage.

 

7. epicondyle — rounded protuberance on or above the condyle of a long bone

The wound pattern shows clearly that he was struck in the temple by the medial epicondyle of the humerus bone found at the scene, though nobody seems to know what that bone was doing there, besides being used as a weapon, I mean.

 

8. clonic — of or related to spasmodic muscular convulsions

But as soon as I released the arm the clonic contractions began once more, which Pieter was apparently unable to control.

 

9. fatidic — prophetic

At the time, of course, we thought he was merely reciting his latest burlesque; it was only later that we realized the fatidic portent of Gunnard’s poem.

 

10. proscenium — that part of the stage in front of the curtain; in ancient theatre, the stage itself

What if all our years of life are merely moments upon the proscenium of existence, if this time upon the earth is mere prologue to the greater drama of creation which will be unveiled when the curtain rises after what we so unknowingly call our demise?

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British slang)

lock-in — private party after hours at British pub where customers are ‘locked in’ after closing time and keep on drinking

Though I always made the scene, I was never one of the in-crowd, never got invited backstage, never was at the after party—hell, I never even enjoyed the excitement of a lock-in.

1. screw — small amount (of a product) wrapped in a twist of paper; such a twist of paper

In the ragamuffin’s pocket (the one without the hole in it) were only two tarnished farthings, a screw of tobacco, and a piece of rough twine.

 

2. univocal — having only a single meaning, unambiguous

But they spoke truly in those times, meaning what they said, in univocal terms, not like today when even the simplest concepts have suddenly become subjects of great debate, and words mean little, if anything at all.

 

3. coistrel — knave, scoundrel

I would not be such a coistrel as to turn away my former patron at the hour of his greatest need.

 

4. buskin — half boot; thick-soled shoe worn by ancient Greek actors in tragedies, cothurnus; [fig.] tragedy, the style of tragedy

With a grandfather who had been one of the lights of Broadway, and his mother who had met his father-to-be while making the third in a series of maudlin movies destined for middle aged wives of the wealthy, Peter seemed born to the buskin.

 

5. dolman — long, open Turkish robe; woman’s mantle with cape-like sleeves

When she fell out of the carriage she had gotten some foliage caught in the beads upon the sleeve of her dolman, and now she sat by the fire carefully extracting every bit of vegetable matter.

 

6. milk-toast (also milk toast) — breakfast dish made of toasted bread in milk, often served with either salt or sugar

The best thing for an invalid is a small bowl of milk-toast, perhaps because it encourages the sufferer to quickly recover so that she can resume eating normal food.

 

7. egesta — excreted matter, esp. urine and feces

During the illness, the patient’s egesta must be collected and carefully measured, to ensure that further loss of body tissue does not occur.

 

8. tumbaga — gold and copper alloy used in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica

Revealed at last, the gleam of the tumbaga figurine peeked out from the plaster shell beneath which it had been hidden.

 

9. ephebe — young man; male citizen in ancient Greece between the ages of eighteen and twenty

These successful developers and grifters know well how to mobilize their armies of Kool-Aid drinking ephebes to quash any investigation into their reprehensible schemes.

 

10. ebriety — drunken state; habitual drunkeness

All five of those lads were found in such a condition of ebriety that I would be hard pressed to accept them as character witnesses.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Latin)

hic jacet — epitaph, literally “here lies”

The work, though not physically onerous for most, did something to the soul, numbing the higher impulses and crushing the spirit until only a hic jacet was left in the eyes and faces of the men and women who had come to this travail with hopes and dreams of a better tomorrow.

1. heliograph — signaling device using mirrors to reflect flashes of sunlight; instrument for taking pictures of the sun

The gang hid out in this canyon fastness after each robbery, secure from the sheriff’s searchers, until Old Kentuck would signal them by heliograph that the coast was clear.

 

2. rootle — to dig with the snout

“It’s hopeless,” she cried. “Every time I get that dog groomed, he immediately runs out and rootles into the herb garden, undoing all my efforts.”

 

3. moribund — near death, dying; stagnant

As he waited in line at Starbucks with the team’s detailed order clenched tightly in his aching hand, Grant tried very hard not to ponder his moribund career and that fateful day at the pizza palace.

 

4. thimblerig — rigged game in which the mark is asked to guess under which cup the operator has hidden the pea, shell game

Once again the Democrats were invited to play thimblerig in their search for Republican votes supporting the bill.

 

5. lag — to send to prison; to capture, to apprehend

“Look, I want to lag this bastard as much as you do, but rushing about like querulous geese isn’t the way to do it.”

 

6. doctress — female doctor, female healer

The widow Mapes was known as a canny doctress, though whether her healing powers came from her potent potions or her persuasive tongue was a subject of some debate.

 

7. pile — sharp metal head of an arrow, dart, or lance; pointed stake driven into ground; [heraldry] wedge-shape charge upon escutcheon with point downwards

Inside the small outbuilding of charred bricks was a pile of brass piles, all that remained of the armory’s store of javelins.

 

8. inspan — [South Africa] to yoke (animals, esp. oxen) to a vehicle; to harness

He told Toby to inspan the cart before the Lieutenant had even finished his tea.

 

9. blackguard — to revile with scurrilous words

In spite of the fact that she had been blackguarded by every newspaper in London, I found the woman at the center of the case to be utterly charming and quite composed in the face of the scandalous charges.

 

10. lazaroidal — of or related to lepers

After the trial, we saw no more of Doctor Fasteau, though I heard a rumor that he had ensconced himself behind the walls of a lazaroidal enclave in South America.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Geordie slang)

radgie — aggressive or violent person

We were going to the club but some radgie was screaming in the street outside so we just headed back home.

1. murrey — purple-red

Somehow the murrey lining made the black hood even darker.

 

2. dobbin — ordinary farm horse

The county fair has everything you might want, from fancy pickles to thrilling fancies, and if you want to take a flier on the dobbins, well, we’ve got that too.

 

3. matriculate — to admit to a college or university, to be enrolled in a college

Women were matriculated at Stanford University from its inception, though at one time Jane Stanford sought to limit their numbers.

 

4. barrack — to jeer at adversaries so as to discommode, to heckle boisterously opposing team

The official simply smiled during all of their insults, calmly refusing to continue his informational speech until the crowd ceased barracking.

 

5. mixtilinear — bounded or formed from lines of different types

A mixtilinear incircle is one of the three circles tangent to two of the sides of a triangle and also to the circle which encloses the triangle itself (its circumcircle).

 

6. varix — varicose vein

In fact, however, duodenal varices are a very rare cause of gastrointestinal bleeding, and are almost always a consequence of severe alcoholic cirrhosis.

 

7. guttle — to eat voraciously and greedily

Harvey will guttle broken glass if you fry it in lard and shower it with salt.

 

8. empery — absolute dominion

Humans have often dreamed of liberation from Death’s eternal empery, positing such disparate fantasies as brain implants into robots or reincarnation as butterflies.

 

9. durbar — public reception of Indian prince or high British official in India

For me the high point of the Khan’s durbar was the mass charge of his calvary, the thundering hooves for a short while silencing the inane chatter and useless gossip which is the bane of all such official parties.

 

10. pelerine — woman’s cape or mantle of lace or fur, usu. with ends forming a point in front

Helen habitually wore a light grey pelerine of lace whenever she left her house, perhaps as a badge of her spinster status.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Latin)

noli me tangere — (lit. “touch me not”) thing or person which must not be touched; prohibition against interference; painting displaying Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene

In spite of his blank noli me tangere expression I bullied ahead, asking once again what he had been doing in his basement before I arrived.

1. artemon — square sail on a sharply steeved spar at the bow of ancient Roman or Greek merchant vessels and ships

Runners were sent forward to furl the artemon so that the master would have clear sight lines as the enemy ships rushed towards our prow.

 

2. vaward — [archaic] forefront; vanguard

The noblest captains of Christendom were in the vaward that day, doomed by the treacherous words of the blackest knave who ever walked those faraway lands.

 

3. wrack — destruction due to violence; ruin, catastrophic change for the worse; remnant left behind after destructive force

Suddenly as it had come the storm abated, and the full moon could just be seen through the cloud wrack on the horizon.

 

4. verderer — officer of the English king having charge of royal forests with especial duty to protect the trees and undergrowth and deer

The venison has grown scarce lately, and the king fears malfeasance by one or more of his verderers.

 

5. invidious — likely to incite ill will or odium; offensively prejudicial

Do not take the bait laid out by her invidious words, as any response at all give her yet another petty victory.

 

6. fug — stale, close air

“Land’s sakes, Jethro! At least allow me to open a window or two and clear the fug from your sickroom.”

 

7. panmixia — entirely random mating within a breeding population

Although panmixia brings mathematical comfort to genetics calculations, the concept is so obviously foreign to actually observed breeding habits of most higher animals that it stands as another example of that rational disdain for reality that too often provides the fuel for the engines of science.

 

8. maunch (also manche) — overly long dropped sleeve fashionable in 14th Century; [heraldry] stylized representation of such a sleeve used as armorial bearing

The maiden in her pale green gown held a single white lily in her right hand, and this color of purity was repeated in the lining of her maunch which opened in descent from her lovely arm for a full two feet.

 

9. currawong — medium-sized crowlike songbird of Australia

These wrens know well their enemies, and even the nestlings can recognize the sound of a currawong walking nearby.

 

10. lower (also lour) — to scowl or to frown, to appear sullen; to look dark and threatening (esp. of the sky)

Our guide met every protest we made with a lowering insolence.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(fashion)

Eton crop — severely short woman’s hairstyle of the late 1920s

Though worn by such icons as Josephine Baker, by 1930 the Eton crop was almost entirely passé, associated only with masculine lesbians.