Vocabulary Builder

As I read on my Kindle, I always look up words that I'm not familiar with and the Kindle stores them in an app called Vocabulary Builder. Far too infrequently, I have a look at the words that are stored there. I should access this resource more often, perhaps I should make it a weekly activity and include a reminder on my calendar. Currently, there are 1307 words stored there, in chronological order it seems. There's also a resource called Flashcards that present the words individually and seemingly randomly by usage and by definition. 

Let's seem what the Flashcards throw up:

Figure 1: https://cvltnation.com/incubi-sleep-demons-sex-spirits/

• incubus as in Privately he wrote off Trumbull as the dead hand of the past - "an old man", he told a friend, "in an institution formed for the promotion of the arts, but which has been an incubus on them." The definition is a male demon believed to have sexual intercourse with sleeping women but also a cause of difficulty or anxiety, the latter being the sense in which it's used in the example. See Figure 1.
  
• chancery as in Aramaic was the language of Greece's greatest foe, the Persian empire; yet the two-hundred-year-old use of it as a chancery language across the empire meant that there was a clear model for Greeks to follow in seeding a Greek-based communications network round their newly won domains. In the UK, the chancery is a division of the High Court of Justice and so it would seem that a chancery language is one that is used in the higher levels of government within a country or empire (as opposed to a vernacular which would be used by the common people).
  
• conflated as in the urban crisis conflates a number of different economic, political and social issues. The definition of conflate is to combine two or more sets of information, texts, ideas etc. into one.
  
• doughty as in his doughty spirit kept him going. It means brave and persistent and derives from the Old English word dohtig.
  
• mooncalf as in As the teenaged Oswald ventured into the world, he was a mooncalf waiting to be exploited. Nowadays, this somewhat archaic word means a foolish person but the word has an interesting history as the following Wikipedia quote illustrates:
  
  A mooncalf (or moon-calf, calvaluna) is a monstrous birth, the abortive foetus of a cow or other farm animal. The term was occasionally applied to an abortive human foetus. 

The term derives from the once widespread superstition, present in many European folk traditions, that such malformed creatures were the product of the sinister influence of the Moon on foetal development. The earliest recorded use of the term was in 1565, referring to a human false pregnancy. 

Modern usage 

The term came to also refer to any monstrous or grotesque thing. Shakespeare, for instance, used the term to describe Caliban, the deformed servant of Prospero, in The Tempest. 

In H. G. Wells' 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon, large creatures domesticated by the Selenites are referred to as "mooncalves." 

Mooncalf is used as a derogatory term indicating someone is a dullard, fool or otherwise not particularly bright or sharp. For example, W. C. Fields in The Bank Dick (1940) advises his prospective son-in-law to avoid being a "mooncalf" by buying shares he has been conned into believing are worth much more than the proffered price. 

Mooncalf is also the name of a species of magical creatures in the world of the Harry Potter series. It is described in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as a shy, nocturnal creature with a smooth, pale grey body, bulging eyes and four spindly legs with large flat feet. Mooncalves perform dances in the moonlight, and are apparently responsible for crop circles. In the film of the same name, Newt Scamander's collection of creatures in his suitcase includes a herd of Mooncalves. See Figure 2.

Figure 2 

Wilfred Maxwell, narrator and protagonist of occultist Dion Fortune’s 1938 novel, The Sea Priestess, refers several times to a mentally handicapped character who falls into the sea and disappears as a "mooncalf".

• davening as in Wilensky did not follow the service, but some internal program or litany of his own, always rocking back and forth, davening, in his own way. In Judaism, to daven is to recite the prescribed liturgical prayers.
  
• habilitating as in After habilitating in 1922 Banach was appointed associate professor at the Jan Kamimierz University. To habilitate means to qualify for office especially as a teacher in a German university.
  
• sacristan as in Blood that I shed upon ancient battlefields is scraped from the stained earth by Hell's sacristans. A sacristan is a person in charge of a sacristy and its contents. The sacristy is a room in a church where a priest prepares for a service, and where vestments and articles of worship are kept. The word derives from medieval Latin sacristanus from the Latin sacer meaning sacred.
  
• Graf as in She travelled through the world and appeared before kings and queens; archdukes and archduchesses; princes and bishops; Grafs and Grafins ... A Graf is a German word meaning a count: a title of nobility in Germany, Austria, and Sweden, equivalent in rank to an English earl. A Gräfin is the female equivalent.
  
• farceur as in Other Cover to Cover panelists included the biographer Victoria Glendinning, the young actor Jack Klaff, and Kenneth Williams, farceur, review artist, and caustic star of the Carry On films. A farceur is a writer or performer of farces, a comedian.
  
• remuda as in The judge walked out and looked over the horses and selected from that sorry remuda the animal least likely in appearance and caught it up. Remuda is a chiefly North American word for a herd of horses that have been saddle-broken, from which ranch hands choose their mounts for the day.
  
• pinnace as in In the summer of 1556, Stephen Borough was sailing along the Russian coastline in an absurdly small pinnace named the Searchthrift. A pinnace is a chiefly historical term for a small boat, typically with sails and/or several oars, forming part of a warship or other large vessel.
  
• salve as in the idea provide him with a salve for his guilt. A salve is an ointment used to promote healing or the skin or as protection; hence figuratively, something that is soothing or consoling for wounded feelings or an uneasy conscience.
  
• yeoman as in Fortunately, there are some excellent scholars and Cold War experts who have done yeoman service in such matters ... In this sense, yeoman means someone who has rendered great and loyal service but historically (in England), a yeoman was a man who was free and not a servant , and who owned and worked his own land and, just to confuse matters, a servant in a royal or noble household, ranking between a sergeant and a groom or a squire and a page. See Figure 3.
  
  

  

  Figure 3

  
  The term is used in the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, where the enlisted rating of yeoman describes an enlisted service member who performs administrative and clerical work ashore and embarked aboard vessels at sea. They deal with protocol, naval instructions, enlisted evaluations, commissioned officer fitness reports, naval messages, visitors, telephone calls and mail (both conventional and electronic). They organize files and operate office equipment and order and distribute office supplies. They write and type business and social letters, notices, directives, forms and reports.
  
  In the American TV series Star Trek, yeomen are mainly female (although sometimes male) enlisted personnel who assist higher-ranking officers, consistent with U.S. Navy usage. The Urban Dictionary includes a definition of a yeoman as an environmentally aware human being ... a person who is for changing the environment and fighting against global warming e.g. Dude, he's such a yeoman for using those solar panels.
  
• primogeniture as in In the thirteenth century the principle of primogeniture or the hereditary right of the eldest son was first advanced. Primogeniture is the state of being the firstborn child. The pronunciation of the first two syllables is pry-mo rather than prim-o.
  
• empyrean as in it was constructed out of wood and cased with lead, rising, as it seem at the time, into the empyrean. Empyrean means of or relating to heaven and the empyrean is the highest part of heaven, thought by the ancients to be the realm of pure fire but more generally the visible heavens, the sky.
  
• shrift as in go to shrift is an archaic term meaning confession, especially to a priest and derives from the verb shrive. However the term short shrift lives on in the language and there is an interesting explanation of its etymology to be found in The Phrase Finder:

What's the meaning of the phrase 'Short shrift'?

To give 'short shrift' is to give little and unsympathetic attention to.

What's the origin of the phrase 'Short shrift'? 

Shrift? Not a word you hear every day. In fact, apart from in this expression, it is now so rarely used that it's hard to think of a shrift that isn't short. 

The verb shrive is also now an almost forgotten antique. A priest in a confession, often when the confessor was near to death, would shrive him or her by imposing a penance, called a shrift, in order to provide absolution. 

Short shriftShrove Tuesday, which most of us in the UK now refer to as Pancake Day, derives from shriving - originally a day when people were shriven or shrove; more recently a day when we toss pancakes. 

In the 17th century, criminals were sent to the scaffold immediately after sentencing and only had time for a cursory 'short shrift' before being hanged. From that literal beginning 'short shrift' migrated into meaning 'give cursory consideration to'. 

The term 'short shrift' is ancient and has been part of the English language since at least the 16th century. 

The first known use of 'short shrift' in print relates to the history of the British monarchy. Following the death of Edward IV in 1483, the Duke of Gloucester was appointed Lord Protector of England. He accused Lord Hastings of plotting against him and arranged for him to be executed. Hastings was allowed only a short shrift as Gloucester was anxious to get his dinner. 

An account of this story was printed almost a hundred years later in by the English writer Raphael Holinshed in The Chronicles of England, 1577: 

Lorde Chamberlaine, whome the Protectour hade speede and shrine him apace, for by Saint Paule I will not to dinner till I see thy head off. It booted him not [it mattered not to him] to aske why, but made a short shrift for a longer would not be suffered, the Protector made so much hast to dinner. 

Shakespeare had undoubtedly read the Chronicles before he wrote Richard III, first performed in 1594, as his account of the events differ little from Holinshed's: 

GLOUCESTER

Off with his head! Now, by Saint Paul I swear,

I will not dine until I see the same. 

RATCLIFF:

Dispatch, my lord [Hastings]; the duke would be at dinner:

Make a short shrift; he longs to see your head. 

'Short shrift' didn't migrate across the Atlantic very quickly. The first citation that I can find from there is from the Adams Sentinel, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, August 1841: 

"The negroes were to be tried on Wednesday, and it was believed that a short shrift and a speedy doom would be awarded to the guilty."