I was wrong!

so I went through the list of 100 words everyone "should" know, and checked to see whether my sense of the words which I wasn't sure of was really the *right* sense. And I found nine more that I didn't actually know properly. so there were really 14 I didn't know. so there. but I learned a bunch of kewl new words.

Ziggurat was not what I thought it was.

I'm not gonna tell you. go look it up yourself. ('kay, you prolly already know anyway).

The new nine I didn't know were diffident, circumlocution, enervate, lugubrious, oxidize, pecuniary, precipitous, unctuous, yeoman.

On a couple of these I had almost the opposite idea in my head--for instance, on enervate, and on diffident.

Expurgate and bowdlerize are quite similar--sometimes defined as synonymous, depending on how you use them.

"Feckless" is fun because it talks about feck, and implies "feckful", which means "efficient, vigorous, powerful". As in "Oh, darling, you're so feckful!" or something.

Following is my pathetic attempt to use these 14 words which I didn't know in a couple paragraphs. It was kind of fun.

The queen's faithful yeomen decided not to circumlocute. He felt too lugubrious and enervated having learned that all three of his quadruplet brothers had died in Iraq. He sensed his own precipitous death, and felt keenly the quotidian nature of his pecuniary chores. No, he would come out and say it--"I love you. Marry me!" He must be neither diffident nor jejune nor unctuous. He must not use merely a moiety of his feck, he must use all of it!

He must also remove the oxidation from his shoe buckle, which it had developed during his vacation while studying the ziggurats in Mesopotamia during his vacation.

(This wee story has been bowdlerized in case any young 'uns happen to read it)