Educated Guesswork

1. spancel — noosed rope used to hobble an animal

Only a short spancel bound his ankles, but his arms were held tightly behind his back in a pair of police handcuffs.

 

2. traducianism — doctrine that the soul is generated from the parents at the moment of conception

Tertullian’s view of the soul as quasi-corporeal dovetailed with his espousal of traducianism.

 

3. aperient — laxative

Licorice helps calm the stomach, and may have a gentle aperient effect.

 

4. surplice — loose white linen overgarment worn by clergy and choristers

A murmur arose from the congregation, and I looked up from prayerful contemplation (oh, all right, I was nodding off) to see a bright red stain upon the preacher’s surplice, a spreading stain of blood.

 

5. estaminet — small café

Luther sat at the tiny table in the back of the estaminet, slowly lowering the level of wine in his bottle, while trying to read his guide book by the poor light.

 

6. immure — to imprison, to confine within walls

Yet we’ve had no word from Rochester since that evening last spring, and I suspect he may be immured in the basement of her house, trapped by the the pandemic and the fascination of the old model train set.

 

7. doddered — infirm; having lost most branches due to decay or age

All that now remained of the glorious tree of halcyon memory was a doddered stump jutting up ten feet or so at an odd angle from the blasted red clay surrounding the equally decayed manse.

 

8. knop — ornamental knob

Set into the center of the false door was an enamel knop displaying the family initial, a rude ‘E’ in the rough handwriting of the first baron.

 

9. piffle — silly nonsense

The family thought Charles spoke mere piffle, but Leslie and I were well aware of the menacing meaning behind his seemingly vacuous words.

 

10. cyclostyle — early duplicating device in which a toothed rowel is used to create holes in a stencil through which ink is forced

My friend Andy thought she had a valuable signed letter from the famous playwright, but it turned out to be only a cyclostyle signature on a mass appeal that was sent to hundreds during the early days of the British suffrage movement.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(French)

en travesti — dressed as the opposite sex for theatrical role, lit. “in disguise”

The police raid made headlines throughout London and even on the Continent, particularly when it was learned that most of the guests were found en travesti.

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.