Educated Guesswork

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The delightful facia of old roadsters, with its panoply of circular dials and gauges, has now been replaced by an oversize, out-of-place iPad.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

1. clinker-built — (naut.) of a ship’s hull built with the edges of its planks overlapping, as opposed to “carvel-built” ships where the planks are fitted side-by-side and flush with one another

The front end view of Viking longships shows the edge-over-edge construction characteristic of clinker-built boats.

 

2. felloe — outer part of wheel into which the spokes are inserted

When wheels were made of wood, with only the outer rim being banded in metal, the felloes were often made in separate arcs, from the same wood as the spokes.

 

3. hendiadys — rhetorical figure wherein a usual adjective-noun construction is replaced by two nouns joined by a copula; any such joining of words (whether nouns or not)

“Please join me in sending our prayerful thoughts,” said the politician, taking the usual platitude for a hendiadys.

 

4. virga — streaky precipitation from clouds which evaporates before reaching earth

The slate-grey virga beneath the massing clouds did not obscure the village at the foot of the mountains, the white adobe bright in spite of the dimming light.

 

5. spate — (Brit.) flood, esp. sudden flooding of a river caused by heavy precipitation

The usually gentle stream was in spate, making it impossible to ford in our small roadster.

 

6. chelonian — of or related to turtles

It had been foolish to settle the pet turtle in an old glass-walled terrarium, for the chelonian brain saw only open space instead of barriers and persisted in driving his head into the walls without cease.

 

7. quire — section of folded printed sheets of paper, for binding with other sections to make a completed book

The old book had been abused: the spine was barely hanging onto the volume, the endpapers and title page were gone, many other pages were torn or loose in the binding, and the entire quire containing the final entries of the index was simply missing.

 

8. halt — limping; lame

The old man was halt and shivering, though whether from exposure or from his aged condition I could not tell.

 

9. escalade — scaling of walls by means of ladders

We quickly destroyed the stairs leading up to the second floor, knowing that the zombies were incapable of mounting an escalade.

 

10. collop — fold of fat flesh

“Because he covereth his face with his fatness, and maketh collops of fat on his flanks.” [Job 15:27]

1. stertorous — characterized by heavy snoring

Until three of the four sexagenarians started using CPAP machines, their Bohemian Grove cabin was famous for the stertorous rumblings emanating from within.

 

2. epergne — table centerpiece designed to hold fruit or flowers

Though Roscoe appreciated the thought behind his aunt’s generous gift, in truth he feared that the delicate glass of the Art Nouveau epergne would be damaged if he left it out on display.

 

3. paresis — partial paralysis affecting motor function but not sensation

The deliberative body seemed to suffer from a legislative paresis, with reports compiled and issued by the sensory apparatus of the various committees, but all attempts at passing actual laws being frozen almost as soon as they were begun.

 

4. ferule — rod, cane, or flat piece of wood (esp. a ruler) used to punish

The stories of Catholic schoolchildren feeling the strike of a ferule across the back of the hand seem to belong to a long-ago time, but it remains a living memory to those who suffered.

 

5. deal — made of fir or pine, or from planks of such wood

A small deal table was a standard item of furniture in the Victorian drawing room.

 

6. presbyopia — farsightedness, particularly that caused by old age

Refusing to wear bifocals or progressive lenses, Jack pointed out that his creeping presbyopia barely affected his ability to drive, and only necessitated longer arms when reading.

 

7. plangent — loudly sounding, esp. with a plaintive, metallic sound (as a bell); or making the sound of waves upon a shore

The resonant thrum of women’s voices rose to a plangent roar that could no longer be ignored.

 

8. apologue — allegorical tale with a moral lesson

To many listeners of the would-be preacher, his story of misspent youth redeemed seemed less like a moving apologue and more like a voluntary and spontaneous confession.

 

9. choucroute — sauerkraut

The thick sausage lay lonely upon the choucroute, its appeal limited by its bedding.

 

10. vicinal — neighboring, adjacent

The closure of the Interstate forced the midnight traffic onto the vicinal byways for a detour into darkness.

1. prolepsis — (1) marshaling counterarguments to a position so they may be refuted in advance

“Just because I’m crazy,” he said as a prolepsis to the wild conspiracy ideas he had just recited, “doesn’t mean I’m not right.”

 

2. prolepsis — (2) prochronism; placing something (person, event, etc.) at too early a date

Many Rotten Tomatoes reviewers noted the heroine’s warning call using the 999 number in 1947 as a prolepsis, but in fact the United Kingdom had introduced the emergency call system a decade earlier, after a disastrous fire in 1935.

Her disbelief that Georgia driver license numbers used to be the same as the person’s Social Security number was just another example of quite common Internet security prolepsis.

 

3. invigilate — to watch over students during an exam

As a WADA official, Jack’s least favorite job was invigilating while the athletes micturated.

 

4. flibbertigibbet — gossip; flighty woman

If his next-door neighbor wasn’t such a distracting flibbertigibbet, she would have been quite annoying.

 

5. chryselephantine — of or covered with gold and ivory

Of the half-dozen lost Seven Wonders, I should like most to see the chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia.

 

6. soteriology — doctrine of salvation

The one-armed man in the back seat of the bus kept declaiming in a loud voice, saying one should never confuse soteriology with Paulinian doctrine.

 

7. fain — gladly

“I would fain support you in this battle, were not I so evilly afflicted by these irksome bone spurs.”

 

irrefragable — indisputable, undeniable

The ability of believers in doomsday cults to rationalize after the world doesn’t end indicates that (for humans, at least) there is no such thing as irrefragable proof.

 

8. gymnosophist — member of an ascetic group of Jains, noted for wearing little or no clothing and for eating no meat

Fancying himself a latter-day breatharian gymnosophist, he sat in his boxers with his feet up refusing to stand lest he kill some small insect on the floor, but we just thought he was a total nutjob.

 

9. petrichor — the smell of rain upon very dry earth

They stood panting after their pellmell dash through the downpour, as the thunder faded into the susurration of the falling rain and the earthy petrichor rose up around them in their makeshift shelter at the base of the overhanging cliffs.

 

10. flagitious — extremely wicked

If you misrepresent another’s intellectual property as your own, I will fully cooperate with enforcement personnel to ensure that your flagitious attack on academic and intellectual freedom does not go unpunished.

*Second example changed to correct poor grade given to original paper

1. eyot — small island, particularly in a river

The raft ran aground upon the small, treeless eyot which lay in the center of the large bend in the river.

 

2. calcareous — of or like chalk

The lizard’s calcareous medication may have added to the constipation of the gecko.

 

3. halitus — exhalation or vapor

As the chemical plant ejected its runoff into the stream, an unpleasant halitus of rank odors seemed to precede the frothy spume.

 

4. diffident — lacking confidence in one’s capability; timid

Horace fidgeted before the apartment door, the diffident bookkeeper hoping perhaps that the young lady would not be at home after all.

 

5. epithalamium — song or poem in honor of newly married couple (also epithalamion)

The bawdy limerick recited by the best man’s soon-to-be-former best friend was the epithalamium which ended all toasts at the reception.

 

6. higgle — to negotiate in a petty manner

Roger would higgle over the most trivial details in a contract, especially when he couldn’t get any of his truly significant demands.

 

7. battledore — badminton racket

In her hands the light battledore became a blur of speed, pummeling the shuttlecock with precise, stacatto strokes.

 

8. eleemosynary –about alms or charity

While waiting for the light to change, the BMW driver gave the one-armed homeless man standing on the traffic island an eleemosynary Jack Chick tract.

 

9. lich gate — small roofed gate to a churchyard

The pastor would stand at the lich gate at the end of the service to shake hands with his departing parishioners.

 

10. scapegrace — entirely unrepentant and disreputable scoundrel

The young scapegrace believed even his six weeks sentence of community service to be too onerous for his brutal assault upon the orphaned teddy bear crafter.