Decorticate (verb).
Decorticate (adjective).
When I was a child I remember my mother always used to describe a peculiarly tasteless wine (usually her own home-made wine) as being “like decorticated cardboard”. Somehow one didn’t have to be told exactly what the word meant!
Crepuscular
Defenestrate.
Defenestration. The action of throwing out of a window.
Hence (as a back-formation) defenestrate. To throw out of a window or to exit through the window.
Verisimilitude
1. The appearance of being true or real; likeness or resemblance to truth, reality, or fact.
2. A statement etc. which has the mere appearance or show of being true or in accordance with fact; an apparent truth.
English possesses about 750,000 words of which some 100,000 are obsolete.
[AC Grayling, The Form of Things]
Amaranth
1. An imaginary flower reputed never to fade; a fadeless flower (as a poetic conception).
2. A genus of ornamental plants (Amarantus, family Amarantaceæ) with coloured foliage, of which the Prince’s Feather and Love-lies-bleeding are species.
3. A purple colour, being that of the foliage of Amarantus.
4. A yellow amaranth: A composite plant (Helichrysum Stœchas).
Amniomancy
A method of divination whereby the future life of a child is predicted from the caul covering their head at birth. The colour and consistency of the caul are used to interpret the future. A vivid colour is supposed to reflect a vivid life whilst the opposite is also true.
A form of divination by examining the embryonic sac or amniotic fluid.
Divination using an after-birth.
Wapentake
1. A subdivision of certain English shires, corresponding to the ‘hundred’ of other counties. The shires which had divisions so termed were Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Notts, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire; in all of which the Danish element in the population was large.
2. The judicial court of such a subdivision.
Distaff.
1. A cleft staff about 3 feet long, on which, in the ancient mode of spinning, wool or flax was wound.
2.The staff or ‘rock’ of a hand spinning-wheel, upon which the flax to be spun is placed.
3. As the type of women’s work or occupation. Hence, symbolically, for the female sex, female authority or dominion; also, the female branch of a family; a female heir.
Image: William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905), Girl with spindle and distaff. (Spindle on left, distaff on right.)
Purlicue.
1. Space between extended forefinger and thumb.
2. Flourish at end of a handwritten word.
3. A discourse, especially its summary.