This Week in Word of the Day/4-21-13

quell \kwel\, verb:

1. to suppress; put an end to; extinguish: The troops quelled the rebellion quickly.

2. to vanquish; subdue.

3. to quiet or allay (emotions, anxieties, etc.): The child’s mother quelled his fears of the thunder.

Muscrat didn’t want to dampen his brother’s enthusiasm, but he just didn’t see how quelling the peasant uprising in the outlands of Mars would:

A. Win the heart of the ravishing Martian princess,

B. Instill any semblance of peace and harmony on the Red Planet,

C. Convince the conniving king to send them back to Earth in time for dinner, thus avoiding one of their ma’s dreaded switch whippings.

Instead of reasoning with Bubbha, Muscrat took another tack.

“Brother, you be careful around that fancy lady or Loralea is gonna sniff her on you and slap you so hard your teeth gonna fall out.”

“Shoot, when you on another planet, it don’t count,” Bubbha replied with a sly smile as he eyed the princess from across the royal table during the pre-war feast.

“You’re funeral,” Muscrat shrugged. “But if Loralea burned down Ellie’s treehouse when Ellie tried to pass you a note, just imagine what Loralea’s gonna do when some green-skinned hoochie get’s her six arms on you.”

Bubbha frowned and stabbed his fork into the softened exoskeleton of the giant, roasted cockroach.

“Damnit, Muscrat, why you always ruining my fun?”

verisimilitude \ver-uh-si-MIL-i-tood, -tyood\, noun:

1. the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability: The play lacked verisimilitude.

2. something, as an assertion, having merely the appearance of truth.

Their love was a grand verisimilitude. Passionate, playful, and doomed, it was exactly what the pair needed just at the moment the isolation was beginning to suffocate them.

They embraced the pairing awkwardly and played at romance like two children pecking kisses behind a bush on a dare. They were broken spirits and it was all they could manage, for now. They talked of futures that could not be, shopped for houses they couldn’t afford, whispered “I love you”, but never loud enough for curious spectators to overhear.

It was a game. From time to time, it seemed like it could have been more, but they knew better. They existed merely to restore one another until the inevitable winds of fate would scatter them to their own corners of the Earth, bolstered by the knowledge that, at least, they still had it in them to love again.

bandbox \BAND-boks\, noun:

1. an area or structure that is smaller in dimensions or size than the standard: It’s easy to hit home runs out of this bandbox.

2. a lightweight box of pasteboard, thin wood, etc., for holding a hat, clerical collars, or other articles of apparel.

Father Thomas never told another living soul about the day he trapped a demon inside his bandbox. At first thrilled about his own cleverness, Father Thomas quickly realized he had no idea what to do with the little beastly thing. It resembled a hairless rat, but with large human eyes. It was remarkably tame once ensnared  outside of some pleading, cajoling, and, once the demon recognized the priest’s resolve, somber weeping.

And the way the demon spoke! The timbre of a Hollywood leading man, but the diction and vocabulary of a scholar. For an educated man, the demon was more seductive than any lustful and lonely housewife haunting the confessional booth.

Father Thomas knew he should have buried the demon, hid it deep in a closet, perhaps even drowned it in holy water, but what incredible things could be learned and the little demon seemed so eager to talk!

“It must be a lonely life, being a demon,” Father Thomas whispered to himself as he sat in an adjoining room, staring at the door that separated them. “Poor thing.”

The demon would never escape the bandbox for the remainder of Father Thomas’ life, but why would he? The demon already had the holy man right where he wanted him.

decamp \dih-KAMP\, verb:

1. to depart quickly, secretly, or unceremoniously: The band of thieves decamped in the night.

2. to depart from a camp; to pack up equipment and leave a camping ground: We decamped before the rain began.

It was an age of thieves and misery. The snow-swept lands were ruled by the unjust and cruel, the subterranean colonies were overrun with barbarians. This world was not created for heroes, for charity, or for selfless sacrifice, yet Bubbha and Muscrat stepped onto the frozen wastelands of Europa, determined to bring light into the dark moon of Jupiter.

“These people have hearts as cold and hard as their oceans, my friend,” their uncanny guide grumbled. Dubbed “Rocky” by the adventuring brothers, the Martian outlander was a stone-faced old man with rust-colored skin, three long, willowy legs and an arm stretching out from the top of his head. His hide was dry and thick, easily mistakable for the parched landscape of his home planet.

“Man, they just have a tough time about things,” Muscrat replied, spitting out a wad of Big League Chew that instantly froze and shattered when it hit the ground. “They’s poop gonna stink just like ours, you got me?”

“I have no idea what you mean,” the Martian sighed. “But I never really have. There are kind people among them, I grant you. I have met a few, but they are afraid of the warlords and will never dare revolt. These people have heard the names ‘Muskrat’ and ‘Bubbha’, though. The Warsari clan decamped when they received word we were coming to their territory and fled down into the ice tunnels beneath the great ocean.”

“Well, let’s go get ourselves acquainted then,” Bubbha said with smirk, then rested his pick axe up on top of his right shoulder.

“They will fight us to the last man,” Rocky warned.

“Nah, just watch as we warm their cold, cold hearts with our country charms,” Muscrat replied playfully as he packed sticks of dynamite into his backpack.

cornice \KAWR-nis\, noun:

1. a mass of snow, ice, etc., projecting over a mountain ridge.

2. Architecture. a. any prominent, continuous, horizontally projecting feature surmounting a wall or other construction, or dividing it horizontally for compositional purposes. b. the uppermost member of a classical entablature, consisting of a bed molding, a corona, and a cymatium, with rows of dentils, modillions, etc., often placed between the bed molding and the corona.

3. any of various other ornamental horizontal moldings or bands, as for concealing hooks or rods from which curtains are hung or for supporting picture hooks.

verb:

1. to furnish or finish with a cornice.

Striking his mountain axe into the cornice, Wilhelm stopped his descent just as his body whipped over the icy edge above a 90 foot drop. The thin, German-American war hero and bold entrepreneur was not a man accustomed to failure. He pulled himself up on the axe, but the ice cracked and the axe began to slip.

His last thought was of his four year old son wielding the garden hose like a machine gun, shooting at their dog who was desperately trying to get a drink of water.

soigné \swahn-YEY; Fr. swa-NYEY\, adjective:

1. carefully or elegantly done, operated, or designed.

2. well-groomed.

Bernard’s soigné existence was built and sustained by the enormous inheritance funneled down to him as the last living relative of the Johansen empire. He fled Chicago the moment his grandfather died and returned to a small, dusty town in the Oklahoma panhandle he’d found while on a meandering road trip in college.

He puttered around the sleepy streets in a refurbished Rolls Royce, he paid exorbitant prices for luxury goods small shop owners carried only on his account, he flew in lovers from around the world so they could pretend to appreciate the country charm.

Bernard took to painting portraits of the townspeople and grossly overpaid them for their “modeling work”. No one ever mentioned that these portraits often coincided with looming bank foreclosures. He was also generous with the church with the unspoken agreement that certain social stances regarding the friends of Dorothy would be phased out.

Once a year, he threw a grand ball in the town’s courthouse. Bernard wore a tux, the mayor arrived in a gown Bernard chose for her, the rest of the community dressed in their best Sunday clothes and everyone got along famously, if for only one night.

Bernard wore the little town awkwardly like an undersized jacket, but while wilting in the midst of a historic five year drought, Bernard carried its people as best he could. He may have not been the savior they prayed for, but he was the savior that arrived.

quoin \koin, kwoin\, noun:

1. one of the stones forming an external wall; cornerstone.

2. an external solid angle of a wall or the like.

3. any of various bricks of standard shape for forming corners of brick walls or the like.

4. a wedge-shaped piece of wood, stone, or other material, used for any of various purposes.

5. Printing. a wedge of wood or metal for securing type in a chase.

verb:

1. to provide with quoins, as a corner of a wall.

2. to secure or raise with a quoin or wedge.

One never expects a two story, six bedroom house to collapse by simply removing a quoin wedged beneath a wall, nor does one expect a table saw to collapse by leaning lightly against it, dislodging the circular saw in the process that then races across the street to lodge itself into the grill of a refurbished 1953 Corvette.

Regardless, Ryan’s first two days on his brother’s construction crew had been eventful.