Quandary Resolutions by Et Seqq

• #3290 submitted 11/04/2011: crapehanger, amalgamate, discriminate, prehensible

   

  Shambling in like some wan, hapless crapehanger out of Gormenghast, the mortuary technician did not discriminate between the quick and the dead, but glumly shook hands with mourners and corpse alike, the distinction apparently not prehensible to one who was himself an eclectic, Frankensteinian amalgamation of revivified organs.
   

• #3289 submitted 11/03/2011: flannelmouth, medium dead, patina, obscurantism

  Call me an old flannelmouth, why don't you, me with my silver tongue, because far from telling you straight that our relationship was already medium dead, I said only that it had acquired over time a certain patina of chill indifference, with our recent tête-à-têtes so austerely repressed as to be positively obscurantist.

• #3281 submitted 11/01/2011: pinstriped, send-up, cerulean, aioli

  As an impromptu send-up of Magritte's late-period Provençal style my table napkin cartoon depicted several pinstriped, bowler-hatted city gents impassively descending through a sky of pale cerulean towards a vast bowl of garlic mayonnaise dip labelled 'Ceci n'est pas un aïoli'.

• #3275 submitted 10/31/2011: chintzy, etiolate, virga, nyctophobia

   

  Behind the chintzy curtains, now torn, stained, and cobwebbed, an etiolated aspidistra shuddered virga of dust as the occupier moved past to light her first candle of the evening - a guttering safeguard against suffocating nyctophobia.
   
   

• #3271 submitted 10/30/2011: clootie, Mediterraneanize, impetuous, thanatopsis

  Old Clootie's decision to Mediterraneanise himself as a Sicilian mafioso was far from impetuous, for he had long fancied putting his cloven feet up by the fireside and composing a thanatopsis on his late unlamented neighbours in Palermo.

• #3267 submitted 10/29/2011: clootie, nom de Web, encapsulate, sepulchral

  As for my spiffing new nom de Web - Young Nick -  I blame old Clootie himself for breathing sulphurically in my left ear: 'Why not go for a truly sepulchral net identity that encapsulates all your manifold fiendishnesses, such as 'Diabolist' or 'Necromancer'?'

• #3266 submitted 10/28/2011: driver's seat, cornhusking, precipitate, berserk

  It being Lammas, there I was, as course leader taking the driver's seat as usual by carefully instructing some of the girls how to make the perfect cornhusk dolly, when one of them goes berserk and with precipitate fury hurls her scissors and paint pots straight at me.

• #3262 submitted 10/27/2011: beginner's luck, wife-beating question, catachresis, perdition

  Of course I must acknowledge that as a chess master he beat me hollow, and that I did not enjoy any beginner's luck; but when I was slow to accept stalemate and he demanded to know why I was choosing to language in a perdition of my own making I was torn between first rebuking him for coming out with such a blatant wife-beating question or for his gratifyingly illiterate catachresis.

• #3258 submitted 10/26/2011: dogsbody, antihero, jitney, animadvert

   

  Enough of these vituperations, of such unwarranted and caustic animadversions, sir, for I shall buttle as your lowly dogsbody no more but take the next jitney into town and find a position with a less dastardly antihero such Mr.Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, who I understand is currently looking for a man.
   

• #3252 submitted 10/25/2011: gentlemen's agreement, verily, pediculous, mesmerize

  As Headmaster I had a gentleman's agreement with parents that they would not send their children to school infested with pediculous capititis, but at first assembly I was verily mesmerised by the amount of head scratching going on.

• #3250 submitted 10/24/2011: fool's errand, miniver, infotainment, anoesis

  I'll never understand why the company bosses chose to kit me out in Father Christmas scarlet furred with miniver, for they must have known that they were on a fool's errand with a 'wrap up warm' TV commercial broadcast in early July, a time when sun and sand were beckoning jaded peons with the promise of two weeks' blissful anoesis far away from such unseasonable infotainment.

• #3248 submitted 10/23/2011: vamp, palatal, layman, ferly

  Being a mere layman (or should I say 'layperson'?) relatively unfamiliar with the vocabulary of vituperative street talk, I was nonplussed when, having rather wittily asked the greengrocer 'Do you have no bananas?', he answered me not jocularly, and with the anticipated three letter word beginning with a palatal approximant, but with a most ferly response that quite took my breath away, namely 'Effineffoff', a fricative-laden injunction that I had not heard since rashly inviting the village vamp to partake of afternoon tea and crumpets at our celibate retreat, possibly to be followed by a nice game of cribbage.

• #3246 submitted 10/22/2011: vamp, subduct, importunate, anomie

  Leaving home, and now resigned to student life in a desolate bedsit, it was with a sense of anomie that I picked up the phone only to hear mum's importunate counsel that I must remember always to subduct my eyes when addressed by a male, for fear of being abominated as a shameless vamp.

• #3244 submitted 10/21/2011: quisle, gleek, sublimate, loll

  If I do not sublimate my compulsion to gleek sputum into your beer, it is because I am being paid quite handsomely to quisle with the management (yes, that bloated pinstripe lolling at the bar), and by discharging so energetically into your beverage I am signalling to him that you are a dissident.

• #3240 submitted 10/20/2011: intuit, flavorless, exodus, tawdry

   

  Even though the décor was a bit tired and tawdry, we could hardly be expected to intuit that the restaurant would serve flavourless food; but rather than make a fuss we made a quick exodus without leaving the expected gratuity.