Vocabulary -- Page 5

nainsook: a fine, soft-finished fabric, usually white, formerly used for undergarments; from Hindi, pleasing to the eye

verisimilitude: the appearance of being true or real

diaphanous: light, delicate, and translucent (especially of fabric)

ineluctable: inescapable; unable to be resisted or avoided

quotidian: ordinary, mundane; that which happens daily

catafalque: a decorated wooden framework supporting the coffin of a distinguished person during a funeral or while lying in state

epicaricacy: Schadenfreude.

denonyms: identifiers for where folks are from, for example, Hoosiers from Ohio; Cornhuskers from Nebraska; Hawkeyes from Iowa; or Iowans from Iowa; New Yorkers, etc. Contrast with ethnonyms.

benthic: benthic zone is the ecological region at the lowest level of a body of water, including oceans, lakes; includes the sediment surface and some sub-surface layers. Animals that live in this region are called benthos. An octopus is a bench.

mendacity, mendacious: tendency to lie

perspicacity: shrewdness; the quality of having a ready insight into things;

perspicuous: lucid; easily seen; clearly expressed; easy understood;

propinquity: in the vicinity; near; nearby;

casuistry: a process of reasoning that seeks to resolve moral problems by extracting or extending theoretical rules from a particular case; generally pejorative, arguments that destroy morality, efface the essential differences between right and wrong; oversubtle, intellectually dishonest, sophistical

sophistry: a false argument; subtle, tricky, superficially plausible, but generally fallacious method of reasoning

conflate: combine into one; “the urban crisis conflates a number of different economic and social issues”; it is easy to “conflate three different theories if they use similar terminology even though the theories may be as different as black and white;

lagniappe: bonus gift, like the baker’s dozen; the thirteenth donut;

puisne judge: french; a lower court judge; homophone in English: “puny”

Verismo: realism in the arts, especially late 19th-century Italian opera; a genre of opera (particularly Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo)

Proscenium: part of a stage; imaginary line where drape falls separating main stage from the apron

Scansion: the action of scanning a line of verse to determine its rhythm; the rhythm of a line of verse (“triple scansion”)

Caul: cape, covering; amniotic membrane enclosing a fetus; the momentum; historical: a woman’s close-fitting indoor headdress or hairnet

Calenture: tropical fever or delirium suffered by sailors after long periods away from land, who imagine the seas to be green fields and desire to leap into them. [Norris: Dakota]