Educated Guesswork

1. specie — coined money

Though cash has become rare, specie is rarer still, for no one wants pennies scuffing a fancy phone case or screen.

 

2. gurning — making a silly or grotesque face [Brit.]

Watching the facial tics and spasms of the psychics as they communicated telepathically made me think I had stumbled into a gurning competition for deafmutes.

 

3. prate — to speak overlong to little purpose

Though he did prate unconsciously and incessantly, gradually a listener realized that he did have a cogent point he was desperate to relate, but which he was unfortunately too inarticulate to communicate.

 

4. dyslogistic — having a bad connotation

It was only after the profiteering of suppliers to the Union Army during the Civil War that the term “shoddy” became dyslogistic, before that time being merely a word denoting a felted cloth.

 

5. charnel — vault for bones of the dead

The shelves in the basement and the notebooks thereupon formed his personal charnel, where his aborted ideas and poetry provided food for silverfish, not for thought.

 

6. umbrageous — shady, providing shade

The umbrageous eucalyptus branches swaying high above in the wafting air lulled him into a hypnotized state of happy contemplation.

 

7. remittance man — emigrant supported by money sent from home

In the novels of Henry James, the remittance man is a 19th-century precursor of today’s trust fund kids.

 

8. marc — refuse remaining in wine press after the juice is expressed from grapes

Though one might very well drink life to the lees, one hopes that the marc will remain untouched, save perhaps by the feet which stomped the grapes to a pulp.

 

9. spume — froth, foam; esp. of the sea

The toddler was excited by the foaming bubbles that resulted from using laundry soap in the tub, but her mother was dismayed by the overflowing soap, which sent its spume far down the carpeted hall.

 

10. truculent — fierce, cruel, barbarous

The rule of the mob now held complete and demonic sway over the men, their truculent faces showing only bestial hate as they focused an evil gaze upon the target of their savage anger.

1. gormless — stupid, lacking in intelligence or vitality

“If you are going to prefer the word of this gormless gamer to mine, so be it!”

 

2. gaum — to smear with a sticky substance

Though the handle of his baseball bat had been thoroughly gaumed with pine tar, it still slipped effortlessly out of his tight grip when he swung fiercely at a curve ball.

 

3. dubiety — doubt, the state of being dubious

He listened to his teenaged son’s explanation for the missing car fender with increasing dubiety.

 

4. thyratron — gas-filled cathode tube acting as electrical switch and rectifier

Though of course most old thyratrons have been replaced by the similarly named solid-state thyristors, the glass tubes are still used in high-power applications such as particle accelerators.

 

5. firkin — small cask for liquids, etc., holding a quarter of a barrel

The pony keg found at a frat boy’s football party is almost a direct descendant of the aledraper’s firkin, though the barrel of ale was of a greater volume than that used for kegs today.

 

6. underwood — small trees or shrubs grown beneath timber

In some cases clearing out the underwood allows the timber to grow larger and more quickly, though this will depend upon the specific situation.

 

7. vaticide — murderer of a prophet; act of killing a prophet

Though five men were charged with the murder of Joseph Smith, all were acquitted in the biased court and the vaticides were never punished for their crimes, at least not in this worldly life.

 

8. bumbaste — to beat on the buttocks; thus, to beat soundly

The snake oil salesman was bumbasted by his indignant audience before being driven out of town.

 

9. chicane — subterfuge, trick; to quibble, cavil

“What chicane is this?” he cried as he plucked the fake pornstache from the hapless salesman’s face.

 

10. wainscoting — paneling of walls or halls, often only on the lower section

If you insist on putting plywood panels on the walls of your basement, be sure to call it wainscoting when you try to sell your home.

1. marmoreal — resembling marble or a marble statue

His newly clean-shaven face accentuated his marmoreal visage as he gazed into the crepuscular distance.

 

2. runnel — small stream of water; small channel

The gutters mirrored the desuetude of the former summer home, and the leaky aluminum had allowed corroding runnels of rainwater to form all around the foundation of the house.

 

3. destine — set apart for particular purpose [usually in passive]

He was destined for greatness, or at least a legacy admission into Yale.

 

4. corrigible — capable of being corrected

We never thought of Bruce as being particularly corrigible, in spite of his frequent (and well-known) visits to a underground BDSM club.

 

5. electuary — medicament with the active ingredient mixed with honey, syrup, or jam

This mountebank claimed an infallible cure for the Grand Pox with his electuary, crafted, so he said, from beetle wings and sowbugs mixed with syrup.

 

diffident — lacking self-confidence; timid

Once upon a time a diffident attitude in a young person might have been merely annoying, if not perhaps appropriate for a newly minted adult; nowadays it is never seen, as even the agoraphobics maintain breathless Instagram activity.

 

6. wicket — small door or opening, often placed in or beside a larger door, for use when the larger entrance is closed

I stumbled while stepping through the wicket in the barn door, catching my boot on its wooden lip.

 

7. strigil — implement with curved blade used for scraping sweat and oil off the body after hot bath

I puzzled over the strange-looking shoehorn displayed beside the fireplace for quite a while before realizing that it was actually a bronze strigil, or more likely a replica of a Greek or Roman original, as the metal seemed entirely unaffected by age (which was more than I could say for myself).

 

8. lollop — to move with bounds and leaps

Towards the enormous ballpit lolloped the children, sugar-crazed six-year-olds bent upon extreme fun.

 

9. cocotte — prostitute

The bold stare of the cocotte held him frozen, and he forgot his purpose in entering the small chamber while she sat unashamed in her warm bath.

 

10. mizzle — fine, drizzling rain

An amber aurora seemed to surround the lonely lamppost which feebly illuminated the mizzle that struggled even to form droplets on the automobiles parked below.

1. pelican crossing — pedestrian crosswalk in which pedestrians press buttons illuminating lights to stop vehicular traffic [has nothing to do with aquatic birds]

On the weekends it was obvious that normal stop lights should have been installed instead of the pelican crossing, as the continual stream of pedestrians flowing across the avenue from one bar to another made it almost impossible for vehicles to make their way up the main drag.

 

2. mortify — to become gangrenous

The air in the lean-to was oppressive and close, becoming offensively so as Stanhope’s shattered leg began to mortify.

 

3. pile — nap of raised fibers in carpet

The thick pile of the dark brown wall-to-wall carpet was a magnet for every bit of dust, hair, derma, and detritus that had ever occupied the small apartment, making the crime scene technician’s job trebly difficult.

 

4. sclerotica — the hard posterior surface of the eyeball, the white of the eye

The foreign object had made scratches in the sclerotica just behind the corner of the eyelid, but these were only annoying with no permanently deleterious effect.

 

5. pleach — (of boughs) intertwined, tangled

They were married beneath a pleached arbor of bougainvillea.

 

6. epenthesis — insertion of a sound or sounds in the middle of a word

He replied to each question with a drawn out two-syllable version of the word ‘well’, making it sound like “well-uhhh”, using the epenthesis to gather his thoughts, I presume.

 

7. cheval glass — full-length swinging mirror hung in a frame

I regarded myself in the cheval glass before departing, deciding that the orange and yellow ostrich feathers in my regimental shako were perhaps a bit too much.

 

8. lawny — covered in grass

The supposedly lawny hills of the Teletubbies were in fact covered with a particularly excrescent variant of astroturf, its unnatural hide camouflaging the domes of the reptilian overlords producing the show.

 

9. endue — (of a hawk) to digest

The raptor could hardly endue the mutant bunny flesh, so dense were the genetically modified leporid thighs.

 

10. knife-boy — boy employed to clean knives

Freeling looked with disgust at the tainted spork, and said, “This is what comes from using a knife-boy to clean the rest of the cutlery; always use the right jobber for the right tool, I always say.”

1. sapropelic — pertaining to or living in mud or ooze made up of decomposed living material

His moral sense weighed quite lightly upon his shoulders, making him especially able to thrive in the sapropelic environs of the District of Columbia.

 

2. fardel — (archaic) burden (esp. of sin or sorrow)

Baudelaire speaks in his poem “Enivrez-Vous” of the horrible fardel of Time which presses us down into the earth.

 

3. tamis — fine-weave strainer

Though the tamis used for making pea soup was once made from corded cloth, the modern implement is constructed from steel and has a large, flat surface to make straining easy.

 

4. dacoit — member of thieving class in India and Burma

Though concern with the activities of dacoits dates back to the 19th-Century East India Company, the bandit gangs are still active, with a large efflorescence of activity from the 1940s to the 1970s.

 

5. obnubilation — overclouding, darkening as with clouds; esp. clouding of mental facilities

Stan realized he was answering the deputy’s questions poorly, hesitating unnecessarily and often correcting or contradicting earlier responses, suffering from the obnubilation caused by lack of real sleep over the past five days.

 

6. gourmand — fond of good eating, often to excess

Though Jason fancied himself a gourmet, his debauched intemperance in eating made him rather a gourmand.

 

7. pelmet — horizontal curtain or valence at the head of doorway or window, used to hide fittings for hanging curtains, etc.

The pale green pelmet above the window behind the piano was where the police found the bloody machete hidden.

 

8. execrate — to imprecate evil upon, to detest; to curse

She execrated me from that day forward, never glancing at me without sinister daggers of evil intent thrown by her baleful gaze.

 

9. scoff — to eat voraciously, to devour

We were only able to spare a small salami and two stale rolls, which the bearded beggar scoffed without compunction.

 

10. feck — efficacy; vigor

The old hound’s weak pawings at the hard packed earth were without feck, and the backyard fence kept him imprisoned as before.

1. scurf — scales of epidermis that are continually peeling off the skin; any scaly incrustation upon a body

The telephone pole on the street corner was pierced with hundreds of large staples at eye level, each metal clinch holding down a geologic scurf formed from the shreds of old announcements of lost dogs, roommates wanted, record release parties, items for sale, and happy hours of weeks gone by.

 

2. chancre — venereal ulcer, painless with a hard base

The residential row had several houses ripped down to the studs before the money ran out, the torn earth surrounding each looking like a chancre caused by unsafe redevelopment.

 

3. cheese-paring — parsimonious or stingy

She was cheese-paring in everything save her extravagant collection of sports bras.

 

4. secateurs — one-handed pruning shears

With a sigh he grabbed the secateurs and strode out to the front yard to deal once more with the recalcitrant bush.

 

5. smut — soot particle

The plastic cigarette filter had caught fire in the overfilled ashtray, and tiny smuts covered every surface of the heretofore off-white room.

 

6. whilom — former, at one time

The whilom lovers now maintained an uneasy truce: she not bringing up that wretched trip to Amsterdam, and he trying not to make that plaguey ‘ahem’ noise at the back of his throat.

 

7. uxorious — doting upon or excessively submissive to one’s wife

Jason was flabbergasted that his bosom pals credited him with an uxorious bent, solely because he let his wife watch The Voice while the game was on.

 

8. facia — dashboard, instrument panel in a car

The delightful facia of old roadsters, with its panoply of circular dials and gauges, has now been replaced by an oversize, out-of-place iPad.

 

9. aposiopesis — rhetorical device in which the speaker suddenly stops, as if unable or unwilling to continue

He would often break off his thought (such as it was) in midsentence, as if inviting those of his audience who had not nodded off to prompt him to continue, but his was not a true aposiopesis, as no force in nature — not even the most obvious disdain from his listeners — could compel him to be silent for more than two or three seconds at most.

 

10. scunner — object of loathing

The office supplies manager poked his head into the room, and we looked at the weak scunner with barely concealed distaste.

1. rennet — membrane from the fourth stomach of an unweaned calf, used for curdling milk in the making of cheese

Cream cheese can be made easily at home, since, like many soft cheeses, an acid such as lemon juice is used for curdling the milk rather than rennet.

 

2. invultuation — creation of an image, esp. a waxen effigy for purposes of witchcraft

The practitioner must ensure she is not disturbed during the invultuation ritual, as a poorly made figure may cause subsequent spells to rebound upon the caster.

 

3. epizootic — disease which propagates quickly among animals

Though the epizootic has not wreaked the havoc among human populations it did in centuries gone by, the bubonic plague still holds rodent populations of the American Southwest in its grip.

 

4. lampyrine — of or about fire-flies

The sinister pines loomed over the tiny clearing, hiding any illumination save for a lampyrine twinkling in the distance, near the bend in the needle-covered track.

 

5. gazump — to cheat by paying more than the final auction price to the dealer, thus taking the item from the rightful buyer

I bid more than I would at a storage facility in my hometown, to keep the locals from gazumping me.

 

6. swart — swarthy; dark in color

The panting swart figure on the shore waded into the surf to draw the near lifeless body out of the sea.

 

7. acequia — irrigation ditch

The unwary bicyclist was jarred out of her reverie as the dirt track crossed the remains of a defunct acequia that once had served the now fallow fields.

 

8. moraceous — of or about mulberry plants

Ovid tells how Pyramis and Thisbe died beneath a mulberry tree, their blood forever staining the moraceous fruit a dark red.

 

9. callow — immature or unworldly

Face to face I was struck by his callow understanding of social graces, the result (as I supposed) of learning about the world through various electronic screens.

 

10. dropsy — old-fashioned word for edema, the often painful swelling of interstitial spaces in the body with fluid

The man Jesus healed on the Sabbath in front of the silent Pharisees suffered from dropsy.