Ten Dollar Word Digression

I have not done as well as I had hoped in keeping track of the unusual words I have come across in my reading, but here are a few that were interesting.

First prize has to go to Wanda Coleman from one of her American sonnets: ustulation.  I don't believe I have ever even seen this word before.  It means the action of burning or searing, which is quite appropriate as she is often calling for burning the whole racist system/society down.

Mistral pops up in the Mavis Gallant story "The Concert Party."  The mistral is a strong, cold, northwesterly wind that blows from southern France into the Gulf of Lion in the northern Mediterranean.  Pretty specific.

I'm pretty sure I read the word exegesis recently.  This means the critical explanation or interpretation of a text.

There were at least a couple ten dollar words in Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, but I think they are lost to me now, as I'm very unlikely to read this novel a third time.

Part of this was sparked by my own misuse of slatternly in the last post.  I had assumed it meant a promiscuous person.  After writing it down, I felt something was off and wasn't entirely sure if it was an adjective (as I had used it) or an adverb, so I looked it up.  It is an adjective (yea!), though it has also been used as an adverb, but I got the meaning a bit wrong.  In fact, slatternly means dirty and untidy, and it is almost exclusively used to describe women.  Now it is only a very small semantic step from dirty and untidy to being sexually unclean, but it still isn't really the proper term (and Rosie is far from an untidy woman).  I probably should have used wanton instead, but I don't think I'll go back and fix it.  

Looking over the other synonyms for promiscuous, there are some really interesting terms, some of which are fairly archaic: licentious, wild, debauched, dissolute, dissipated (though I think of this more in terms of alcohol or drugs), profligate, wanton, of easy virtue, fast, loose, round-heeled, riggish (I've never heard this one!), tarty, trampy, slutty, and easy.  I will definitely have to find a way to use riggish in my writing one of these days.

Edit (9/11): I was browsing through the short poems in James Pollock's Durable Goods (which finally turned back up at the library after being lost for months) and came across the word exigency, which means "an urgent need or demand."  I don't think I've stumbled across this word previously, though it could be taken as a false cognate of exegesis.