Friday Vocabulary

1. stifle — joint between tibia and femur in rear legs of some four-legged animals, corresponding to human knee

Pugs are, of course, subject to patellar luxation (also known as slipped stifles) so you want to be sure your dog shows strength and free action through the hocks and stifles.

 

2. heterochromia — having different colored eyes

In one of the most horrifying experiments, especially in its use of children as test subjects, Magnussen and Mengele attempted through chemical means to ‘cure’ heterochromia.

 

3. wittol — knowing cuckold

“Hie back to your so-called home, you weak wittol! Your wife may need you to make her breakfast when she returns from her lover’s arms.”

 

4. rutch — to scootch, to slide

I rutched my chair closer to the deal table so that I wouldn’t miss a word of Heather’s whispered confidences.

 

5. demihour — half hour

And now I waited the longest demihour of my existence, the time it took Papa to get dressed, hop in the family wagon, and speed down to the police station.

 

6. prisiadka — Slavic dance step in which from a squatting position the dancer kicks out first one and then the other leg

But after the fifth vodka Gregor became convinced that he could still perform the prisiadka of his Cossack youth, and there was nothing for it but that the tables and chairs would have to be pushed back to the walls so that he would have ample room to make his embarrassing experiment.

 

7. intrant — [archaic] one who enters, entrant

If the intrant to the School of Law has not graduated in the above described manner, he shall be examined by a board of faculty members to determine his level of general scholarship, including proficiency in Latin as well as either Greek or two modern languages.

 

8. quaternary — fourth; of something with four parts; [initial capitalized] of the most recent age of geologic history

While it is quite facile to say that the Quaternary Age begins at the end of the Pliocene, in practice it can be quite difficult—especially when dealing with mammalian fossils—to distinguish between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene.

 

9. renitent — unyielding, resistant to pressure; recalcitrant

But as an unhappy result of his stalwart efforts fighting the Nazi regime, Haushausen found himself frozen out of the new regime, apparently considered too renitent to make his participation or even association worthwhile.

 

10. smalt — powdered glass admixed with cobalt oxide, used to add color to glass products

Neuman dates the first use of smalt to 1443, when Venetian craftsmen produced delicate blue glassworks by the process, but he does not provide sources for this assertion.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Latin)

contradictio in adjecto — contradiction in terms; legal principle whereby any ambiguous terms in a contract are to be interpreted to the detriment of the party who insisted on the introduction of such terms into the document

But, contra Rousseau, he argued that the very phrase ‘natural rights’ involves a contradictio in adjecto, since the state of nature is such that it is illogical to refer to such entities as ‘rights’ at all.

Friday Vocabulary

1. pen — female swan

We tried a stealthy approach to the swans, but the pen spotted us and let out a warning cry, whereupon the cob rushed at us, forcing our ignominious retreat.

 

2. iceblink — brightness in sky caused by light reflection off of sea ice or glaciers

But the yellowish glow of the iceblink beneath the distant clouds told more clearly than any other sign that the seas before us were still filled with treacherous ice floes we would have to traverse if we were to reach the lost party’s last known location.

 

3. clabber — to curdle

He nearly became blind after trying to wash out the pepper spray with milk that had clabbered after a long day in the hot sun.

 

4. koine — lingua franca; amalgam of Greek dialects that replaced Classical Greek in the Hellenistic Age

Usage of the Tang koine, not only in government and commerce, but also in Buddhist and Taoist temples, spread so widely to literary circles that reading pronunciation of Chinese characters to this day still descends from this standard.

 

5. vitiate — to spoil; to invalidate; to pervert, to debase

It is not the so-called ‘violent criminal’, but the supposedly non-violent ‘white collar’ criminal, now an executive or perhaps a government agent or even a elected official, it is these who vitiate the very fabric of society itself, by repeatedly stealing untold millions from the public weal, and often yes causing as many no many more deaths than are ascribed to supposed ‘street criminals’.

 

6. strigoi — undead spirits risen from the grave in Romanian folklore

Obviously Bram Stoker based many details of his Dracula upon the Balkan mythology of the evil strigoi.

 

7. organoleptic — of or related to perception by sensory organs

Your mathematical analysis of the nutritional content of the meal is all very well and good, but my organoleptic analysis is that it still tastes bad.

 

8. antrum — cavity in a bone or other part of the anatomy; esp. the nasal cavity

Drainage of the antrum was performed by removal of the carious tooth and perforation of its socket.

 

9. backdate — to antedate, to mark with date earlier than actual date

The British governor was happy to backdate a request for U.S. aid, giving the Grenada invasion at least the sheen of legitimacy, if not operational success.

 

10. egolatry — constant credence in one’s own potential and ability to the point of pathological self-worship

With the removal of narcissism from the DSM, the triumph of egolatry seems complete, with the inability of selfish people to suffer any consequence for their actions, up and until the inevitable result of the Dunning-Kruger effect crushes them and the rest of us beneath the weight of unintended consequences.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(outdated medical)

hypochondria — upper region of the abdomen, including the organs of the liver and the spleen

Indeed, Burton speaks in his Anatomy of Melancholy of the belief that the seat of melancholy was in the hypochondria, the location of the liver.

Friday Vocabulary

1. gnomic — aphoristic

Here we see the poetic power of The Beatitudes, their gnomic wisdom shining forth in a manner not seen, for example, in the Decalogue.

 

2. frontlet — decorative ornament worn on forehead; phylactery

Depending from her frontlet, the wooden body of which depicted one of the many gods and powers tormenting the mental lives of the Wamiweri people, the princess had several beaded silver wires hanging down with an enormous rough emerald at the bottom of each.

 

3. dicrotic — of a pulse having two beats for every heartbeat

I wished that I had the ancient Chinese art of pulse diagnosis as I felt the odd, skipping, dicrotic beating of Sir Richard’s pulse beneath my thumb, until I came to my senses and realized that, yes, I was stupidly taking his pulse with my thumb.

 

4. euchre — to trick, to outwit

Well, I guess I got euchred out of my horse fair and square, so to speak, but that don’t mean I have to like it.

 

5. flounce — to move in exaggeratedly impatient or angry manner; to make overdramatic movements; to decorate with pleated trimming

“Well! I never!” she said as she flounced out of the dining room, audibly sniffing with her nose in the air, which provoked Bill to say sotto voce “I’ll just bet she has.”

 

6. succory — chicory

White succory makes a beautiful change in daily salads, its thin red lines making a colorful contrast to the blanched leaves.

 

7. Brummagem (or brummagem) — gaudy and cheap; fake, counterfeit

Once again, Grandmama had given him some brummagem toy instead of what he’d asked for, so Wilton (or ‘Wiltie’, as she called him) found himself pretending to thank her profusely for the knock-off Tickle Me Malmo, its hideous blue and yellow head leering at him in an alarming manner.

 

8. obliquity — state or condition of being neither parallel nor perpendicular, quality of being oblique; mental perverseness

He approached the overheating problem with his usual obliquity, announcing that he was going to the beach “for research” for the rest of the afternoon.

 

9. eidolon — phantom, ghost; ideal, representation of idealized thing

Jane Harrison speaks of the destructive process whereby human beings take their gods, so forceful and potent in original conception, and overthink them and intellectualize them until they become mere eidolons that can no longer perform any of the purposes for which they were originally besought.

 

10. teratological — monstrous, of or related to congenital malformations

After retiring from active practice, Dr. Wells devoted himself to his teratological collection, perhaps becoming over-devoted to his private museum of the bizarre and grotesque.

 

Friday Vocabulary

1. howe (also how) — barrow, tumulus

The aged king was laid in a great howe near the source of the river for which he was named.

 

2. riband — [archaic] ribbon, esp. a decorative one

But Jane’s new bright red riband couldn’t entirely hide the thin patches on her most festive headwear, and once more she wished so much they could afford a new hat—or hats, of course, since Mother’s was even more worn.

 

3. heteronym — identically spelled words with different meanings; different words naming the same thing; imaginary character used by author to write in different style, pseudonym

By showing the tangled consequences which follow the decision of the protagonist to hide his male identity behind a female heteronym, the author—behind his (or her) own pretentious nom de plume Reinhard de St. ffaulkes—wishes to delineate the intersecting and radiating spheres of modern identity, but, in the end, just leaves us all a bit confused, as I suspect the author himself (or herself) may have been by the time he (or she) arrived at the macabre courtroom scene, with its strange interplay of light and shadow and facts from documents opposed to facts from eyewitnesses, not all of whom seem to be precisely differentiated or even characterized.

 

4. boor — rude person; yokel; peasant

Yes, I quite understand why you had to invite him, the big boor, but I don’t see why you had to seat him next to Agatha, who is probably my most sophisticated friend.

 

5. tattersall — squares formed by crossed color lines over another, usually light, solid color; fabric in this pattern

He wore his habitual yellow tattersall waistcoat with its red and green lines beneath his green corduroy jacket with the leather elbow patches, and thought himself quite dashing.

 

6. impendent — impending, imminent

The whole house was suffused with an air of impendent disaster, though it was an open question whether the legal cataclysm would strike before the final collapse of the leaking water pipes.

 

7. quale — subjective perceptible quality considered as independent entity

I found it impossible to assemble the various qualia arriving fuzzily at my mind into any coherent picture of the real world objects associated with them, though whether this was due to my illness or to the very strong drugs they had given me, I cannot say.

 

8. misericord — room in monastery where some relaxation of monastic rules was permitted; small ledge on folding church seat providing support for people standing; small dagger or pike designed for making a killing ‘mercy’ stroke against a wounded enemy

Besides this effulgence of talented artistic depiction, it remains as well to investigate why so many of these intricate English misericord carvings depict sin and sinful acts.

 

9. palanquin — small boxlike litter for carrying a reclining passenger by several men holding poles attached to the conveyance

In Eastern Bengal at this time regulations were drawn up for the regulation of palanquins, generally following those already extant for hackney carriages.

 

10. yoctosecond — 10−24 seconds, one septillion of a second, one trillionth of a trillionth of a second

So far, scientists have little to say about the time during the Planck Epoch, a ten-trillionth of a yoctosecond in duration, or 10-43 seconds.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British slang)

camp as a row of tents — flamboyantly effeminate

Now Uncle Howard, he was camp as a row of tents, but we was all surprised when Reggie came out that summer and then ran off with that scrawny professor, the one with the torn ear and the daft glasses.

Friday Vocabulary

1. doula — trained woman assisting mother during and after childbirth

Though the doula may provide emotional support and practical advice, she differs from a midwife in that she cannot perform medical activities.

 

2. congener — something of the same type as another; living organism belonging to same genus as another; fusel alcohols and other chemicals produced during fermentation (besides ethanol) which give a liquor its characteristic taste

Many claim that drinking very pure vodka almost obviates the risk of hangover, citing its near lack of congeners which some suppose engenders the morning-after malaise.

 

3. doughty — brave and resolute, valiant

“So once more, my doughty comrades, up and at them!”

 

4. protanopia — daltonism, color-blindness between red and green

The prevalence among males of protanopia is one reason for the standardized red-yellow-green sequence of traffic lights, though in some cases the inability to detect red colors can make the sufferer unable to detect whether the red light is actually off or on.

 

5. garrote — to kill by strangling, esp. with a thin cord or wire; to kill with iron collar formerly used in Spain for executions

Christopher Lee, like all British commandos, was taught dozens of ways of dealing death, from a sudden knife thrust to the spine to garroting a sentry from above.

 

6. culm — [botany] plant stem, esp. of grass or sedge

In order to more fairly compare the two yields, we shall measure the number of grains per culm in our study.

 

7. culm — waste coal or coal dust; inferior anthracite

To most effectively use all this excess culm, however, it must be dried and pulverized to obtain anything like a steady heat.

 

8. piezometer — instrument for measuring pressure of fluid, or compressibility of same

To better understand the strata permeability, a series of fourteen piezometers was placed about the tract.

 

9. hipshot — having one hip lower than the other

He shuffled hipshot towards me, his characteristic ungainly gait the result of some childhood boating accident I’d been told, but the crabbed look on his face needed no explanation, save that he was just pure mean through and through.

 

10. Malagasy — person from Madagascar

The second mate was a Malagasy whose smile grew bigger with each abusive order he threw at his gang of lascars in the pinnace.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(divination)

splanchnomancy — divination by examination of human entrails from victim sacrificed for that purpose

Though some later Christians accused the ancient Romans of splanchnomancy, in fact those pagans practiced haruspicy, the art of reading portents from the viscera of sacrificed animals, not humans.

Friday Vocabulary

1. qaid (also caid) — local leader or judge in North Africa; Berber chief

But the qaid interrupted Deschamps at this point, and brought out the leather-bound edition of Cooper’s works we had presented to the chieftain, and Teddy and I knew then that our gift had been a prescient one indeed.

 

2. shrike — any of several species of songbird with strongly hooked and toothed bill, used by some species to impale or rend their prey

Also called the ‘butcherbird’ from its habit of leaving the bodies of the eaten prey hanging from thorns, the northern shrike is larger than its southern cousin, though the latter plays with the remains of dinner in the same fashion.

 

3. choad — [slang] short and squat penis; loser; perineum

“Okay, okay, you don’t have to be such a choad about it, we’ll try calling her one more time!”

 

4. carl — [archaic] churl, peasant

During the festival the roles were reversed, and a carl might sit at the very head of the table, hoping to be waited upon by a noble (which never seemed to happen, to be sure).

 

5. pap — bland food, porridge; nonsense, foolish word

I won’t be satisfied with the pap you give to the voters out on the stump.

 

6. pap — [archaic] teat, nipple

The maiden sat now silent in the corner, her twins feeding at her paps.

 

7. trudge — to walk laboriously or wearily

And so we go on, trudging down the road of life towards an uncertain future from a past that seems increasingly impossible in this bizarrely extended present.

 

8. squill — lily-like plant found in Europe; sea onion

The red squill is effective against rats though it is generally shunned by domesticated animals.

 

9. kedge — to warp a ship or boat by hauling on a cable attached to an anchor dropped at some distance from the vessel

In these shallows the sloop from time to time would ground but was always as quickly kedged off by our stout cabin boys, who seemed to enjoy the mundane task.

 

10. piles — hemorrhoids

“Sorry Travers can’t join us; he claims a distant cousin stopped by for a sudden visit, but I suspect his piles are bothering him again and he couldn’t face the prospect of sitting for three to four hours at the opera.”

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(decorative arts)

delft — tin-glazed pottery typically having white opaque glaze with decoration in blue, usu. Dutch or English

The delicate power of fine delft can be seen in the gorgeous enamel but especially in the beauteous decoration.

Friday Vocabulary

1. panentheism — tenet that God is the entirety of the universe and yet somehow transcends the universe as well

The author claims Rumi as a believer in panentheism because the Sufi poet finds God to be both transcendent and immanent, but then again, this is also the view held in most Catholic orthodoxy.

 

2. antiperistasis — quality whereby opposition to a force causes the original force to grow stronger

Through some miracle of antiperistasis Jennings functioned best in the worst situations, just as when he was the only man aboard the yacht to keep his head when the reef stove in the hull, but in ordinary times he was lackadaisical, almost soporific in his attitude, giving no attention to anything whatsoever as if he could not be bothered unless the circumstances were truly dire.

 

3. antiperistalsis — reversed peristalsis, upward (instead of downward) impelled motion of the intestines’ contents

And as a secondary consequence of the neuro-motor damage Lieutenant Soark was afflicted with a terrible and violent antiperistalsis, with results which I shudder to recall and which I dare not describe.

 

4. rugosity — state of being wrinkled or corrugated

The several spring showers which had pleased us so much had unfortunately left the dirt road to Old Man Mosley’s house in a terrible state, and the rugosity of the loose-packed gravel threatened to buck our Model A into valley below.

 

5. tire — [obsolete] to dress, to attire

She tired her hair with jewels in a cunning golden net, giving pride of place to the huge sapphire her lord had given her the evening before.

 

6. barchan — crescent-shaped sand dune formed by wind

Our headlong flight took us to the base of a deceptively short barchan, whose height of sand was sufficient, however, to hobble our horses and prevent our escape from Black Robert and his marauders.

 

7. heliotrope — pinkish purple color; flowers for which the color is named

He opened the door wearing an angora sweater of such a distracting heliotrope that I found myself forgetting why I had interrupted my neighbor’s breakfast.

 

8. delf — pit, quarry, mine

Into the dark delves fell the miners as the retaining piles gave way.

 

9. cheviot — coarse woolen twill fabric

Comfortably bundled up in his cheviot motor coat, Flenders pulled on his driving gloves and invited us to come along for the ride.

 

10. criminogenic — causing crime, of the bases of criminal behavior

Parker, on the other hand, turned the equation completely around, positing that the most significant criminogenic impulses arose, not in the conditions and stresses affecting the poorest and most vile citizens, but from the so-called ‘leaders of society’, whose own villainies were papered over with the euphemism of ‘white collar crime’, as if the much greater despoliations and numerically more significant losses of life and health were mere bagatelles of crime, and thus (in Parker’s view) this snidely dismissive insouciance towards the greatest lawbreakers—certainly the largest in terms of actual material theft and human suffering—led to a concomitant belief pervading all levels of society in the ultimate worthlessness of human beings and thus the rise in crime statistics of the lower classes which was so trumpeted by the media.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Jungian psychology)

enantiodromia — supposed tendency for any extreme in a system to arrive or to turn into its opposite

But all this focus upon the power of human reason may engender the enantiodromia that Jung claimed to find in any extreme perturbation of any psychologic system, as when the triumph over superstition during the French Revolution led to the—quite reasonable, I’m sure—noyades and other judicial murders of thousands across all the lands of France, and just as reason led Che Guevara to kill his own thousands as commander of La Cabaña Fortress.

Friday Vocabulary

1. mononymously — using a single-word name

And so he joined other mononymously known natural scientists such as Darwin and Mendel, though in Lysenko’s case it was because he was infamous as a fraud.

 

2. landrace — plant or animal exemplar purposely bred to thrive in local conditions

The bitter potato landraces exhibit greater pest resistance, but this is offset of course by the lower price at market.

 

3. henrietta — twilled cashmere

She wore a scarlet jacket made from some of the new dyed henriettas just imported from Europe.

 

4. rectify — to make right, to correct; to purify through repeated distillation; to change into direct current

If you will provide the details we shall be pleased to rectify the omissions posthaste.

 

5. abscissa — x-coordinate of point in Cartesian plane system

The abscissa is customarily taken as the independent variable.

 

6. hierarch — high priest; person in high position of authority

The court ruled, however, that the priest was working solely as an agent of the hierarch, and therefore that high official bore liability for the tragic events of that fateful Thursday.

 

7. caprine — of or related to goats

In the shuddering dim light of the dying fire the would-be cowboy’s dude ranch woolies took on an ominous caprine appearance, as if the furry chaps now revealed a pagan demon or the archfiend himself, summoned to this blood-drenched land by the weird tales told by the old and bitter cook.

 

8. telpherage — automatic and usually electrically powered cable car system for moving minerals or other goods

Fleeming Jenkins is known as the primary inventor of the telpherage system, developing the idea while at the University of Edinburgh.

 

9. aigrette — egret crest feather or feathers used as headwear decoration, or similar decorations formed of jewels

Whether made from heron feathers or only simulated from stiff lace, an aigrette is an absolute necessity for a hat worn by any lady of fashion this season.

 

10. quoit — rope ring or ring of flattened metal, used in tossing game

Bernie then tossed his final quoit right over the attentive tail of our poor Westie, causing her no little discomfiture.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(Latin)

cacoethes scribendi — mania for writing

So fierce became his cacoethes scribendi that soon no surface was safe and we could no longer visit our favorite restaurant, lest he cover the table cloth and napkins with his detailed thoughts upon the strange—and to his mind, suspicious—death of the inventor of the Diesel engine.

Friday Vocabulary

1. fescue — pointer of straw, wire, etc.

Chillingsworth now placed the tip of his birch fescue on the map projected upon the wall by the clever device he’d carried in his vest pocket.

 

2. oho — exclamation of surprise, elation, recognition

“Oho!” exclaimed Percy brightly. “Looks like the hand is afoot now!” as he played his initial card.

 

3. rhonchus — wheezing or rattling sound made during breathing, caused by non-gaseous material in the lungs

With a mighty rhonchus he jackknifed himself into a sitting position upon the overstuffed feather bed.

 

4. rarefy — to make less dense

Of course the possibility of rarefying the habitual thought patterns of the career politicians involved in this mighty effort may seem minuscule at best.

 

5. filigree — intricate and delicate decoration made of metal wire; ornate or intricate design

As I leaned closer across the threshold of the bed, the ruddy lines that marked the enormous proboscis took on a mysterious and portentous air, as if his giant avuncular nose (a family trait which, I am glad to say, I do not share with my brothers) had been decorated with a lace filigree of red threads depicting some long-ago forgotten map of a long vanished region, perhaps the railway lines of the Carpathian Mountains during the very time of my ancestors of whom my bedridden uncle was speaking at this moment with such vehemence.

 

6. suzerain — state or ruler having control over dependent state

Though the duchy henceforth was allowed the fiction of independence, in all but purely domestic affairs it always had to bow to the will of its suzerain in Aachen.

 

7. eruct — to belch

Now from the back of the classroom as Mr. Heaney was waxing rhapsodic on the power and glory that was Rome came a thunderous reverberating roar from the very bowels (as it seemed) of Spivey, as that tyro felt the action of the gallon of ginger beer he’d consumed after morning maths, and the entire class approved the interruption as the poorest student in class eructed a long and deep sonorous counterpoint to the teacher’s enervating lecture.

 

8. antinomy — contradiction, paradox

But unfortunately it was at this precise moment that the deep antinomies of rampant capitalism were seen in their worst guises.

 

9. antimony — silver-white metal element used in alloys and medical compounds

The 51st element in our modern periodic table was known best in ancient times in its black sulfide, making antimony the source of kohl, one of the primary cosmetics of early history.

 

10. aptotic — [linguistics] uninflected

Over two-thirds of its nouns no longer exhibit any plural form at all, making Swedish the most aptotic language in the Germanic family.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(French)

lèse-majesté (also lese majesty) — crime against dignity of the sovereign or the state, treason; offense against established order

The absolutism of the Sun King’s rule has its roots in the tyrannical edicts of Roman emperors such as Tiberius and Caligula, who invented the crime of lèse-majesté to persecute anyone who dared to not treat them as the gods they purported to be.

Friday Vocabulary

1. abseil — to rappel

I knew we were in trouble but I only began to suspect just how much trouble when a helicopter appeared overhead and four men in black began abseiling from it on long ropes down into the clearing next to the charred remains of the ice cream van.

 

2. irredentist — of or related to policy of acquisition by a country of territory belonging to another because of historical or cultural ties; advocate of such policy

The commission hoped to avoid such irredentist squabbles by a forced migration of the two peoples, though any historian could have advised them against such dislocation.

 

3. growler — four-wheeled carriage, hansom cab; large container for beer

Leaving the rest of our breakfast upon the table, we rushed quickly to the street and hired a growler to take us to the depot.

 

4. Bantustan — one of the quasi-autonomous ‘homelands’ for blacks under South Africa’s apartheid regime

Of course the Bantustans were some of the most sterile land in the region, obligating those residing within to work cheaply at the pleasure of the whites to obtain the necessities of life.

 

5. precipitate — very sudden, abrupt, heedlessly quick; to make happen prematurely, to cause to suddenly occur; to hurl down

Because of your precipitate release of this buggy software we have lost an opportunity to make serious inroads into our competitors’ market.

 

6. precipitous — steep

Charley finally staggered still moaning away from the precipitous cliffs, but the crisis was not yet fully over.

 

7. parison — mass of molten glass just before being blown into a final shape

At Williamsburg the boys liked nothing better than to watch the glassmaker take the glowing parison and shape it into a pitcher, a tumbler, a vase, or seemingly any shape he desired.

 

8. arnophilia — bestial sexual congress between men and sheep

But of course the perverted pleasures of arnophilia are not nearly no frequent as you seem to believe, especially out here in the country.

 

9. niello — black mixture usually consisting of silver, sulfur, copper, and lead, used as fill in silverwork, leaving black lines or background when the surrounding silver is polished

But the real stunner of the find was a 9th-Century Anglo-Saxon dagger with silver and brass inlay, with the name of either the owner or the craftsman in niello letters.

 

10. obambulate — to walk around, to wander

One day God was out walking with his angels when he came across Satan, who was also obambulating about.

 

Bonus Vocabulary

(British nautical)

Irish pennant — untidy loose ends of rigging or lines

“How can you call your boat shipshape when you’ve got dozens of Irish pennants hanging about everywhere?”